Insights 11.17

Foreword:

Presumably, many of you read our newsletter every week in part because we engage with the social and political dimensions of design, technology and behavior. 

Last week the U.S. elected a president who campaigned on a rhetoric of hate and there is a real possibility that the hateful rhetoric could turn to hateful actions and policies. 

While we do not embrace a single political party or ideology, we have never been neutral. Political realities are inseparable from the fabric of life itself, and so neutrality is an impossible state to achieve or hold.

Our friends, colleagues, collaborators and team members are LGBTQ people, Muslims, immigrants, people of color, etc. and our lives, our work, and our clients' companies are better because of this. The notion that exclusion or a system of tiered rights could improve anything is an ugly lie that we will not accept.

If design and technology is to deliver on the promise of creating a better world, it has to be done through inclusive, forward thinking practices: developing tools and systems that enable freedom, protect the vulnerable, and empower the disenfranchised. 

We all have work to do. Take your powers of influence, skills, and resources seriously and use them to good in this world.


Design:

• It feels like reporters have grown weary with the parade of consumer focused connected devices. Whether it's an internet enabled egg carton or a "Keurig for juice" - so often the value delivered is marginal to nonexistent. The latest product to get roasted for dubious utility is a "smart" toaster oven called June. What the article really nails is the phenomenon of technology developed to solve problems, that ends up creating more problems through cumbersome interfaces and interactions. Are we really that bad at cooking, and if so, is it that hard to get better at it? Humans have a deep desire to build skills, and get better at things - maybe the next wave of consumer focused tech can address that need instead. 
• Emoji watch: a Saudi teen successfully persuaded the Unicode Consortium to add a hijabi emoji in their next update and Apple has walked back their more realistic peach emoji, with the latest iteration blending the suggestive qualities of previous versions but making it a slightly more specific. 
• Investors typically want their portfolio companies to be chasing massive markets and most production methods for physical goods have high up front costs, which leaves lots of helpful but niche solutions left unbuilt. 3D printing for consumers is wildly over-hyped, but this collection of accessibility widgets demonstrates that the technology has made a real difference in many lives. 

(Dis)trusting Technology: 

• After some high-profile exploits run on the so-called internet-of-things, the U.S. government has issued some security guidelines. Not exactly too little too late, but it's always best to start with a framework of threat-modeling and expecting abuses/breaches of new technologies rather than trying to play catch up with problems down the line.  
• In 2016, we rely on algorithms for all kinds of things - to serve us relevant news stories, to route rideshares our way, and even to inform political campaign tactics. The Washington Post looks at the how Hillary Clinton's campaign relied on algorithmic planning to chart the course, and how that may have lead them down a road to failure. 

Archiving: 

• A video tour of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, designed to withstand all kinds of apocalyptic scenarios with precious seeds intact - in theory giving civilization a head start in rising up from the ashes through agriculture. 

More next week. 

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.