Insights 9.07

Design:

• How the tendency to design for the "average" leads to all kinds of problems for the real, diverse world of people. Add to this the long history of data sets that omit whole populations due to racist or sexist practices and we're living in a world that doesn't suit many of us very well. There is a hope that new technologies will reduce the cost of customized solutions while enabling easy distribution to fractured markets to ease the pains of ill fitting solutions. While that has happened to some extent, whether it's an education or a suit, bespoke products still carry a cost premium over the mass produced versions designed to serve the average. It isn't clear yet whether the world of "big data" will lead to better outcomes for outliers or carve out new generalizations that are more focused but still harmful in their assumptions.

Labor Pains:

• The gig economy isn't working out so well for many on the front lines. A big survey from Deloitte finds that 67% of respondents would trade their independent contracting lifestyle for something more stable. Uber is perhaps the most (in)famous for depending on contractors, and by their own report in 2015they lose about 11% of drivers after one month, and around 50% at the one year mark - certainly not stats that suggest a contented labor pool. Deloitte found that the culture of a workplace was a significant factor in how satisfied independent contractors are, which may reveal why Uber fairs so poorly with retention: being summoned on the demands of someone else hardly feels like independence, and when a bad rating can get you kicked off of a platform, there's limited possibilities for true comradery in the customer-contractor relationship. 

Machines for Moving: 

• A very smart piece by Chenoe Hart on how the future of transportation could be a sort of end to transportation, less about self-driving cars and more about a constant mobility of spaces both domestic and commercial. She also describes how new modalities of travel (train, car, plane) necessitate new conceptual maps and interfaces to understand reality where space is abruptly compressed.

Building Things:  

• How Google X is managing their moonshot projects after the restructuring of Alphabet. Translating the bold, sometimes sprawling efforts of their R&D to a new mission of commercial successes is bound to be a difficult task, and one that will take some time. In related news, Google announced they are ending Project Ara, their ambitious effort to create a modular smartphone. 
• General Electric just made some big acquisitions for 3D printing metals, picking up Arcam and SLM Solutions Group. GE is perhaps the most prominent user of 3D printed metals, particularly for their aerospace divisions, and bringing that kind of heavy industry power totally in house will grant them some potentially significant strategic advantages. 

More next week. 

Insights 8.28

Design:

• Looking at the aesthetic and experiential sameness of the videogame No Man's Sky, where the environments are procedurally generated. The article mentions the "10,000 bowls of oatmeal problem", where each bowl has oats arranged differently, but in doing so makes no meaningful impact or impression on the viewer/diner. At a moment when AI is hyped for its potential to displace even our most creative labors, it seems that the old ways of humans carefully crafting (whether visuals, experiences or words) will continue to outperform the machines for awhile. Maybe it takes a human to unearth what is most resonant for another human,and simply grinding out possibilities mathematically will fall short of stirring whatever essential piece of humanity we carry around inside us.   

Technology as a Threat:

• How bitcoin may be contributing to the increasing amounts of ransomware taking network-accessible documents and devices hostage. The U.S. Department of Justice says there are now 4,000 such attacks per day.

Seen/Unseen: 

• A story on a secretive program surveilling Baltimore's streets that was adapted from tactics used in Iraq. With the ongoing debate around how militarized our municipal police forces are, a localized spy program is a troubling signal of opacity where there should be transparency. If we are being continuously monitored in public spaces, citizens have a right to know how such a program works and why it exists at all. Perhaps the most curious thing about the surveillance program it was funded with private dollars, allowing it to stay in the shadows to a degree that would have been impossible with public money. 
• Elsewhere: how the rich and famous skirt technologies like Google Street View, paying high prices for privacy. From architectural tricks of concealment to using shell companies on property documents, building the perfectly walled garden requires a comprehensive strategy that is beyond the means of most. 
• A ghost to the machine: a paper on methods of duping machine vision systems to see faces where there are none. 

Bias and Brains:  

• A fairly comprehensive study that looks at how women in engineering get sidelined from their studies and careers by bias and discriminatory practices. Among the findings of the report is that women studying engineering are (more often than men) looking to apply engineering to solving social and environmental problems - it seems fair to say that the inequities in the profession could be robbing us all of a better future. 

More next week. 

Insights 8.22

Design:

• Design icon John Maeda is moving on from the world of venture capital at Kleiner Perkins to Automattic - the makers of WordPress among other things. 

Feeding the Future: 

• As Hormel's most notorious product, SPAM is a symbol of everything from post-war food technology to how commodities get gussied up with branding. Produced at a rate of 1.5 million cans per week, SPAM is international hit, a regular component of diets across the world but as demographics and attitudes around food in the U.S. have shifted over the years, Hormel has sometimes struggled to maintain its market relevancy there. Bloomberg looks at Hormel's use of anthropologists to develop a new directions in their product offerings and determine which companies make sense to acquire. There's a real difference between understanding the elements of culture to better meet user needs versus understanding how to coerce customers with marketing- in the short history of big, corporate food companies they have mostly relied on the latter. Time will tell where Hormel's efforts fit on that spectrum. 

Communication:

• In an attention economy where marketers, advertisers and UI/UX designers are constantly concerned with the metrics of engagement, the comment sections that follow news stories generate a great deal of activity, an unfortunate percentage of which is made up of toxic vitriol. NPR (with their relative independence from advertising concerns) has decided that it's not worth keeping the troll cave that is the comment section open. Their decision was driven in large part by a deeper analysis to determine that their actual listening audience and the commenters were not really the same crowd. It underscores the difference between organizations that are driven by mission instead of purely focusing on profit at any societal cost. 

Roadmapping the Future:  

• From banks to tech companies, many are betting on (and pushing for) a cashless future, where all transactions pass through an electronic portal at some point. While this is portrayed as a more convenient, secure, and clean way of moving money around, there's also the potential for huge losses in terms of privacy, community autonomy and the kinds of 'gray markets' that allow those on the lower end of the economic food chain to survive. 
• It can be easy to forget that many 'disruptive' technologies intended to democratize access are still far from evenly distributed and leave those promises of revolutionary change unfulfilled. For example, many in the U.S. still do not have reliable access to the internet - now a library in Denver is letting patrons take out Wi-Fi hotspots to help close the gap on the digital divide. 

Building Things:  

• One of the recurring obstacles faced by wearable tech companies is the variability of human bodies, including things like skin sensitivity. McDonald's just pulled a simple pedometer product for kids based on complaints of skin irritation. 

More next week.