Insights 9.14

Design:

• How "political engineering" led to an unwieldy, dangerous and ultimately useless helmet for the military. 
• BuzzFeed with a deep dive on the 3.5mm audio jack standard and what led Apple to jettison it on their latest iPhone. While Apple has legitimate reasons for the change (better performance, maintaining a slim profile while packing in new camera & processor tech) it does leave a lot of existing products on the wrong side of compatibility. When waste not want not, and conservation of resources are known as the most sustainable practices at what point does the improved performance of an innovative but incompatible solution outweigh the waste generated? For designers concerned with their contribution to waste, standards can be a wonderful thing: enabling interoperability over generations of products and preserving the value of hand-me-downs or secondary market goods. 
• The challenge of making digital, personal communications legible to viewers in movies and television. 

Body/Image:

• The fashion industry does a terrible job of designing clothing for women's bodies, pouring their efforts into creating looks for the small and slim, leaving everyone else with limited options. The data in the article demonstrates significant market opportunities for more inclusive design practices, which seems to indicate that some designers/retailers are more committed to policing arbitrary body norms for women than making extra money. While some believe that markets will provide solutions as long as there is a profit motive, the history of capitalism shows many exceptions to that supposed rule. Whether it's the continual whiteness of Hollywood productions or the makers of Cristal expressing distaste for rappers consuming their product - the contempt that certain corporate leaders have for those that don't fit into their worldview can supersede their pursuit of broader markets. When solutions for underserved populations do emerge, it's generally from within those populations being frustrated at the lack of options.

Building Things: 

• Determining sustainability of solutions in design or tech is much more complex than it initially seems. Actual user behavior is a huge factor that can undermine even the greenest of concepts, and it is notoriously difficult accurately predict those interactions beforehand. Case in point: it turns out that those reusable grocery tote bags end up having a much larger carbon footprint than their disposable plastic counterparts. 

Bias and Brains:  

• Up until a week ago, LinkedIn's algorithms favored men in search results.

More next week. 

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.