Insights 11.07

Design:

• Apple's iOS updates have been gradually making emoji more detailed, realistic and less abstract. While this makes sense in terms of taking advantage of larger, higher resolution displays, it runs counter to the expressive capabilities of more abstract emoji. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics perhaps sums this up best: the less specific a representation of something is, the more it allows the viewer to project their own experiences and intent onto it. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a peach isn't just a peach. 

Building Things:

• Reebok is experimenting with printing parts of their shoes instead of using hard tooling to reduce the time between concept and product. While you should take any story about 3D printing replacing traditional manufacturing with many, many grains of salt, the combination of specifically formulated polymers and a large extruder head makes the process much faster than most printing methods if still a little impractical for making products at scale. 
• Building physical products is a process that requires careful thinking about each part of the supply chain. Many of details that make a real difference for the user experience or cost are mundane but ultimately are what separate from the successful from the also-ran. GRIT has a nice behind the scenes blog post looking at what goes into building a better box for shipping their off road wheelchairs. 

Automatons: 

• Despite all the talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back, U.S. manufacturing has passed a tipping point where automation has outpaced outsourcing in terms of employment impact: the value of goods produced goes up even as the number of jobs goes down.

Bias and Brains: 

• Why the outcome of "teach girls to code" programs is likely more complicated than it appears.
• The advertising industry is notorious for carving up populations into artificially discrete demographics so products and services can be pitched to more receptive audiences, however over the decades certain segments of society have been left out because of discrimination. BuzzFeed examines how stereotypes contribute to the lack of marketing efforts directed towards queer women.

More next week. 

Insights 10.31

Design:

• Apple has been gradually revealing a dongle-filled future, so much so that The Wall Street Journal's tech reporter Joanna Stern has done a round-up of your dangling dongle options. For a company that's usually nearly synonymous with elegant, simplified hardware, it's feels like an odd middle era for Apple. Only time will tell if this is a temporary detour as technological bridges get built, or a fundamental shift in their standards and practices when it comes to product development.

Technology as a threat:

• As more electronic objects are connected to the world outside our homes and offices, the once irrational fear of the new and unfamiliar playing tricks on us has become a completely rational, all-too-real threat. The vulnerable webcams that served as the staging ground for last week's botnet DDoS attacks have been recalled, which may be the first time that a tangible product has been pulled from the market for intangible failings that did not directly affect the owner/user. When the internet of things gets haunted, it could be someone hundreds or thousands of miles away getting spooked. 
• The immersive power of VR can be disorienting, enthralling or disturbing - which means developers of virtual reality games/experiences have a higher level of responsibility to predict and mitigate potential harms. A recent article recounting harassment in a VR game has been making the rounds online, and the developers of the game in question responded, taking responsibility for their failures and roadmapping how such challenges could be navigated through 'digital defense' features. We're big believers that if you're building products, experiences or services, having a team with diverse experiences helps predict and prevent these kinds of problems before they emerge. While women are more often the targets of online and in real life harassment, the developer team seems to be all male, which may have contributed to this particular blind spot persisting all the way through to launching their alpha version. 

Feeding the Future: 

• "Future Food" tech startups continue to stumble - Soylent has recalled more of their products after numerous reports of customers experiencing disruption of the gastrointestinal variety. To date Soylent has taken a software development style approach to their products, shipping iteration after iteration rather than leaving a fixed recipe in place. After these recent recalls, they'll need to supplement this agile approach with more rigorous testing.

Humanity Intersecting Technology: 

• Twitter announced that they are shutting down Vine, the social micro-video platform that fueled countless memes and other viral cultural artifacts. Mark S. Luckie, formerly of Twitter and Reddit wrote an excellent piece on what Vine and other social platforms have meant for black creators, and what black creators mean to the culture of the internet at large. The closure of Vine represents a larger paradox of socially networked tools: the ones we love the most are often the most difficult to monetize. Vibrant, creative communities are not always compatible with making it easy to serve up advertisements, and the richness of ad-hoc cultural production can reveal just how much fun can be had in generating independently and consuming socially, outside the broad agendas of brands. Humans at their best are far too idiosyncratic for most large corporations to feel comfortable aligning themselves with: our collective unpredictability and constant cultural innovation outpaces the attempts of marketers to parse, package and re-sell it to us. Where our digital commons collides with the demands of venture capital, maybe it's only the good that die young. 

More next week. 

Insights 10.24

Design:

• Consumer electronics are ruthlessly and rapidly commoditized which leads to many attempts at building better mousetraps through added features or leveraging design to find distinction and stoke desire. Eve-Tech took a radically user-driven route in their most recent tablet product, crowdsourcing the development through a large community of could-be customers to determine the feature set, finishes and even some of the engineering trade-offs. Product market fit is a big risk, even for established brands so having this crowd-vetting is a tempting method for mitigating risk. The downside risk is that crowds tend towards a more conservative development, asking for familiar features and incremental adjustments whereas Apple can and does kill off longstanding technologies in favor of overarching strategy (killing the headphone jack being the most recent), it's unlikely 5,000 users would sign off on such a choice. 
• How bad design decisions make getting your vote to count more difficult.

Technology as a threat:

• Unsecured or poorly secured internet-of-things devices were recently weaponized: turned into a huge network of bots and used to orchestrate an epic distributed denial of service attack that brought down iconic internet brands like Netflix and Twitter. While it raised a lot of worries for technologists in the know, it's unlikely that end users will be terribly concerned about the news, if they follow the story at all. The consensus seems to be that if we're going to cover the earth with connected widgets, we need to improve the security of those objects with better engineering and designing user-onboarding that makes higher security and patching the default, not the best practices of power-users. 
• Platforms that fail to take the abuse and harassment that travels via their tools are starting to pay a serious financial price for it: Salesforce and Disney both allegedly backed out of offers for twitter based on the potential for a sort of toxic-halo effect, tainting their brands with stories of high-profile harassment. Whether twitter has the will, technology or momentum to correct the nastiest corners of their platform remains to be seen, but developers of future social products and services and their investors will certainly be looking at user harassment in a different light.

Automatons: 

• A thoughtful read on the powerful symbolism and embedded ideologies of car culture in the U.S. and the impact that driverless cars will have in remodeling those philosophies for the 21st century. Will the end of independent ownership of cars and the rugged individualism filtered through expensive consumer goods mean a shift in the flavor of capitalism practiced in the U.S.? 
• Industrial robotics heavyweight Fanuc is teaming up with the chipmaker Nvidia to create a "mind-hand" connection for robots with the goal of allowing them to learn on the job; troubleshooting their way through minor changes that would detail traditionally programmed robots. While human hands remain more flexible, nimble and reliable than machines in the near term, the ability for machines to share their "experience" instantaneously across a network is a unique superpower that could rival our own intelligence sooner than anticipated. 

Our Weird Future: 

• There's a local startup that's developed a connected wine bottle. Last week we tried it out with some wine experts for the Boston Globe.

More next week.