Insights 12.05

Design:

• Twitter finally makes accessibility for images easier, with tools built right into their platform. 

Body/Image:

• Breakthroughs in microfluidic or "lab on a chip" technologies are enabling some pretty amazing wearable devices that do far more than count steps. The latest isa patch that analyzes sweat to determine concentrations of glucose and lactate, among other metrics, all accomplished without a circuit board. The result is space efficient and has a strange biologically inspired sci-fi elegance to it. 
• Investigating the supply chain of hair - a troubling, comprehensive look at where the hair extensions sold in New Zealand come from. 
• It appears Fitbit is picking up smart-watch startup Pebble. In the aftermath of the consumer wearable boom/bust cycle, it looks like going forward Apple, Fitbit and Snap Inc.will be the brands to beat (or join). 

Machines for Moving: 

• When we think of data in the 21st century we often associate it with wireless connections, innately mobile, and floating somewhere in the cloud. The reality is data still has to live in physical sarcophagi of silicon, metal and plastic. Amazon continues their deep logistics strategy play, unveiling the "Snowmobile" - a truck with a shipping container stocked with 100 petabytes of data, complete with a security detail (just in case you get any Shadowrun-inspired data heist ideas). 

Behavior: 

• A brief history of the consumer.
• How scientists, designers and engineers conspire to create addictive patterns in digital products. A line towards the end of the article sums up this problem (and many others) quite neatly: "There is a fundamental conflict between what people need and what companies need." There is still a great deal of hope that things like open-source, distributed community projects and tools for democratizing product development (like 3D printing) will lead to products and services that are more humane in their effects and intent, but the profit motive has incredible power to produce outcomes that are unhealthy for society at large. 

More next week. 

Insights 11.29

Design:

• As any graphic designer, ad exec or 13th century stained glass artist would tell you - images have real power to inspire, influence or coerce us. Motherboard profiles the bizarre pseudo-spiritual beliefs around image making and meme circulation from the recent election. Perhaps there's something in opacity of algorithms and automated content sorting lead humans to turn to magical thinking. 

Building Things:

• The startup Jibo, working on a robot helper for the home has announced another delay - putting their initial product shipments about 2 years out from the original plan. Complex hardware is difficult for even huge companies with deep benches of talent and solid vendors to execute successfully on (see Samsung's recent recall stumbles) so delays are the norm for startups. The more troubling complication the article mentions is that beta testers didn't seem to be able to find ways of interacting with the device that were especially useful or rewarding. Shipping late is forgivable, shipping an underwhelming first product is usually a death sentence for startups. Jibo would probably be in much better shape if Amazon's Echo products hadn't come along in the interim - we're guessing that Alexa takes care of 90% of the needs that something like Jibo (a fixed location robot) would do for a user.
• The Brookings Institute with a report on why bringing manufacturing back is more of a time travel issue than a geographic one: automation is cheaper and technological advances mean more value produced with fewer jobs. In 1980 it took 25 employees to achieve $1MM in revenue in a manufacturing context; today the same amount can be generated by 5. 

Big Business: 

• The consumer wearable technology market herd continues to thin - Intel is shutting down their wearable offering, the Basis Ruby. Considering we've never seen anyone wearing one, we're not that surprised. Building a compelling consumer product line or brand is among the most difficult business opportunities to pursue.

Feeding the Future: 

• Cows are a substantial source of methane, a problem substance in efforts to slow climate change. So far reducing meat and dairy consumption has been the primary prescription for cutting cow-originated fumes, but a farmer in Canada along with some researchers have found that switching livestock feed to seaweed resulted in significant gas reductions (~20%), which may make the climate, and the cows, rest a little bit easier. 
• As people in the U.S. are recovering from the overload of Thanksgiving leftovers in the form of turkey, cranberry sauce and stuffing, a startup called Spoiler Alert is working to develop tools to curb food waste. Current estimates put the amount of food waste value in the U.S. at around $218 billion annually across consumer, farm and store stakeholders. A recent triumph of the startup was helping the Greater Boston Boston Food Bank find homes (and stomachs) for 11,000 organic eggs. It's a great example of how technology can be used to reduce inequality and waste within a complex system - something we can all be thankful for. 

More next week. 

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.