Insights 12.12

Design:

• Pantone unveils its color of the year for 2017 - it's called Greenery: a "refreshing and revitalizing shade, Greenery is symbolic of new beginnings" - it seems like brands are recognizing a hunger for optimism in the face of ongoing bad news and a general pessimism about the entirety of 2016. 
•  Seasoned tech reporter Walt Mossberg says that current consumer tech trends are putting form too far ahead of functionality, and creating inferior (if good looking) user experiences. We think the rise of power derived from being a platform is a piece of this bad-for-user puzzle, with the big tech companies content to make devices that intentionally do not play well with others, seeking to own the whole tech ecosystem of the end user. This leads to lots of clumsy and frustrating work arounds, turning the promise of greater convenience via technology into an annoying chore. So if you want to get ahead as a tech company building consumer products maybe take the bolder stance of being generous with your customers and making things that work for their needs first and foremost, even if it cuts into your product ecosystem opportunities.

Building Things:

• An interesting interview with Astro Teller, talking Google X, moonshot projects, and what can/should kill ambitious endeavors. Google has been trimming back a lot of these big-opportunity, high technical risk blue sky projects in the last year. We will see if that trend continues as they tighten up spending overall.
• From Backchannel: a little behind the scenes at Pebble's downward trajectory that led to selling, and canceling crowdfunded products that seemed promising - but will never ship. 

Automatons: 

• Costs are falling, deployments are increasing for soft robotics: machines with flexible, conforming, non-marring grippers and actuators. It's an area of innovation that we've been involved with for awhile - much of the tech has spun out of research labs at MIT and Harvard, the Boston area has become a bit of a hub for robots of the squishy variety.
• Big tech companies are focusing on how to get you out of brick-and-mortar retail as fast as possible, and without human cashiers. This past week saw stories on Panasonic's efforts, as well as a slick video from Amazon of a (theoretically) quick and seamless way to get in and get out of their stores. What is a gain of convenience could also be a loss of privacy, with more specific sales data linked & stored to identifying info. Future data breaches for big retailers could lead to even more damaging PR events. 

(Dis)trusting Technology: 

• Post-election there has been a great deal of talk about filter bubbles - Wired suggests that our future blindspots might come from our butler-like bots that listen to our requests and serve up information, news and feedback, but maybe only what we, or they, want us to hear.
• Connected children's toys may be a little too connected - allegedly eavesdropping on conversations and sending that info to a software company known for its government contracts in defense and intelligence sectors. If that doesn't get your thinky-face emoji sense tingling, we don't know what will. Maybe go with some wooden toys for this year's holiday season gifting.

Roadmapping the Future: 

• Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times writes about the decline of gadgets, at least when we define gadgets as consumer electronics widgets. The rise of the do-almost-everything smartphone, enabled by massive strides in miniaturization means we don't need nearly the same amount of discrete products to do the handful of jobs traditionally left to gadgets (record sound, take a video, take a picture, make a call, send an email etc.). From the perspective of reduced carbon and e-waste, this at least has the potential to be a very good thing - we are doing more with fewer products. What the article seems to miss is that there has been, and continues to be huge growth when it comes to adding 'gadgets' or instrumentation/IoT-type products for commercial and industrial applications. In our opinion and experience, the single-function gadget isn't dying, it's just gone professional.

More next week. 

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.