Insights 10.03

Design:

• A discussion on the staying power of midcentury modern furniture and a bunch of design folks highlighting examples of both the stale and the underappreciated. 

Watching the Watchmen (with Data):

• An early study suggests that when police wear body cameras, complaints against the police drop a staggering 98%. 

Building Things: 

• A new video from Formlabs that features our company and client Righthand Robotics came out earlier this week. It's worth a look if you're curious about how low cost rapid prototyping enables continuous product development/agile manufacturing processes (or if you just want to see some beautiful shots of robots and rubber). 
• The Washington post with solid reporting on the dirty, dangerous work that goes into mining cobalt, a key ingredient in lithium polymer batteries that drive everything from smartphones to electric vehicles. If we really want to design a better future for ourselves, we have to solve problems throughout the entire system rather than focusing almost solely on the final user/customer. It also points to a need for devices to last longer, reducing the total amount of cobalt required (this was one of the reasons we were so excited some of the modular concepts in the Google Project Ara phone. If you're interested in alternatives, check out Fairphone).

Virtually There:  

• How arcades in Japan leverage simple physical experiences to heighten the impacts of virtual reality.

More next week. 

Insights 9.26

Design:

• When analyzing the outputs of human culture we think of architecture, high art, revolutionary technologies and design icons. But nothing is a more honest reflection of an era than what is discarded: the debris of living and consuming as society. A designer in New York has compiled some of the most commonly encountered bits of trash into a periodic table of street waste. 
• Snapchat revealed their first hardware product: Snap Spectacles, and rebranded to Snap Inc. As with any big tech play, opinions abound. We think it's a cleverly designed product for several reasons, which you can read here. 

Feeding the Future: 

• The history of irrigation technology in the U.S. and it's precarious future in the face of climate change. As humans, we have amazing powers to re-engineer our environments to suit a variety of needs and wants but we can be undone by our own greed or optimism, hoping or believing that the resource pools we draw from will always provide. To survive, we have to adjust those expectations and be more shrewd in our resource management practices.
• Vegan food company Hampton Creek (best known for their eggless Mayo products) commissioned an audit of their environmental claims of huge water savings over their egg-based competition. The outside auditor found that the reduction in water used was significantly smaller, and Hampton Creek quietly removed their sustainability calculators and proclamations. The article from Bloomberg finds other problems at the company, ranging from dubious data to suspicions of outright fraud. Given that reducing animal protein consumption is critical for reducing carbon emissions in general, let's hope that the alleged malfeasance of one of the biggest names in the category of future food doesn't have a chilling effect on investment in the segment overall. 

Just a Game:

• How the aesthetic conventions of videogames have found a place in war propaganda. 

Building Things: 

• One of the huge challenges of managing a major product recall is getting the word out to those affected before something goes wrong. Samsung is using the very device being recalled to put the message to users: when your potentially volatile Galaxy Note7 boots up, it tells you how dangerous it is to keep using it and asks you to power it down. Another article goes behind the scenes of Samsung to understand how the critical flaw may have made it through the design and engineering process in the first place. 

Roadmapping the Future:  

• Apple's CEO Tim Cook says he favors Augmented Reality tech over Virtual Reality - citing, among other things, how AR allows users to stay more engaged in the real world. Given Apple's long track record of guiding big trends in consumer electronics and computing - there will be a lot of technologist's following Apple's moves in AR closely.
• Making the things we use last longer (particularly resource intensive products like electronics) is one of the best things that can be done for environmental sustainability. Sweden is trying to incentivize repair practices through cutting the tax rate on repair services significantly and increasing taxes on chemical inputs for creating new products. 

More next week. 

Insights 9.19

Design:

• A really good conversation from O'Reilly media with Cathy Pearl on the design of voice-based interfaces.
• The success or failure of design initiatives (whether products, systems or services) has less to do with feature sets and aesthetics and more to do with understanding the complex interactions between humans and the object or service at hand. New York City is currently grappling with these questions - the WiFi kiosks with tablets that were installed in the city found that there were some NSFW uses, sometimes by homeless people. For now, the city has shut down the kiosks and is trying to figure out what if any limitations on capabilities they should have. Design teams sometimes have a certain "ideal" type of user in mind and forget about the full spectrum of humanity that makes up a major urban center. Arguably homeless users are the members of the public most in need of these kiosks and should have been included early on in the design process as stakeholders. From there functions and features could be built out the right way, rather than reacting to user behaviors the initial design team didn't anticipate. 

Virtually There:

• The effects of virtual reality and augmented reality technologies on the brain are far from known - but early evidence suggests it could have significant impacts on how our minds process information and spaces, including changes in how we dream.

Building Things: 

• Though Tesla gets the press and prestige, General Motors has been quietly building highly effective, low-cost electric vehicles. Another interesting detail of the article is that Tesla has supposedly moved away from some manufacturing management methods widely considered to be best practices (Toyota method, Kanban, etc.) in order to meet production goals, at the expense of quality: Consumer Reports has stopped recommending the Model S due to customer's reporting quality issues. 

Roadmapping the Future:  

• Two years in, the MIT Bitcoin Project has been met with a lukewarm response. If bitcoin can't get widespread traction at a university that is nearly synonymous with technology obsessed early adopters and innovators, what chance does it have of finding acceptance in the broader market? 
• Every year, offices in the U.S. print out around 1 trillion pieces of paper. While the paperless office concept has long been part of the marketing language for software products, our compulsion for the tangible text or image is only now starting to wane. Christopher Mims says the time is finally right for transitioning to truly pulp-free productivity. 

More next week.