Insights 1.04

Design:

• A writer working as a chatbot designer discusses the challenges of humor, developing a digital personality, and the pitfalls of gendering AI assistants like Alexa and Cortana.

Energy: 

• Panasonic is looking to fuel Tesla's vision for a clean energy future by investing $260 million in a factory focused on photovoltaic products in Buffalo, NY. 
• U.S. officials say that a Russian hacking operation was able to get very close to the electrical grid via a Vermont based utility company. Infrastructure experts have been talking about the vulnerabilities of the grid in the U.S. for many years, but congress has been slow to fund projects designed to "harden" the grid with additional security technology. News like this may expedite such projects moving forward in 2017. 

 

Body/Image: 

• Facebook acquired The Eye Tribe, a Danish startup that has developed eye-tracking technologies, presumably to build a version of it into future virtual reality offerings via their Oculus hardware platform. For a company that derives growth from selling the eye-attention-time of users to advertisers, the possibility of having more detailed information on where exactly someone's eyes are at a given point or what emotion their face is revealing is of huge interest. Advertisers would love to have a more complete picture of viewer sentiment, and if Facebook can offer that it gives them a serious advantage over other platforms. How people would feel about their smallest movements being tracked and used for opaque marketing purposes is less straightforward.

Big Business: 

• Coca-Cola decided to shut down its Founders program that collaborated with startups and provided investment. We predict that many large corporate innovation projects rolled out in the last several years will see cutbacks or total shuttering in 2017, as the model has seen limited success. As with any product or organizational initiative, it's crucial to understand the "why this, why now" and when incumbents began chasing after startups it seems that few really knew how to generate meaningful results for themselves or the companies they were funding. On the other hand, organizations built from scratch to work with startups seem to be hitting their stride and expanding: hardware programs like Bolt, Highway1 and HAXLR8R, or the cleantech incubator Greentown Labs. In our opinion, most large corporations are better off tapping into these smaller, more agile groups instead of building their own internal programs.

Roadmapping the Future: 

• What futurists do, and why demand for their ability to prototype possibilities is rising.
• India's Prime Minister is pushing for broader adoption of a digital payment app to replace cash in that country, which is feeling the crunch of cash shortages and discontinued currency notes. Big policy changes that affect a country's culture (of privacy, payments or property) often get implemented during a crisis when options feel limited and acting quickly seems essential to avoid catastrophe. Once one country adopts an entirely cashless economy, others will surely follow the lead, as it tends to have some real advantages for governments in terms of tax collection and detecting criminal activity. But a cashless future isn't a guaranteed improvement for everyone: turning financial transactions into information has all kinds of privacy implications for the average citizen, and could give autocratic regimes even more powers of control by keeping them connected to the movements of purse strings at a household level. 

More next week. 

Insights 12.27

Design:

• Notable logo / brand moves in 2016. Some feel trivial: Netflix goes for a folded look, Instagram absorbed some net art visuals, Mastercard went flat, Kodak went retro. Others are aesthetic harbingers of deep societal change like a flag to represent a nation composed of refugees or the "Make America Great Again" hat. Visual design both reflects and attempts to shape the cultural era it lives in. For 2017 we should watch carefully for attempts to harness the power of design for ill; for anyone that would gussy up hateful ideas in a gloss of perfectly kerned letters and fresh logos. Though it feels more vital and immediate now, in any time we owe it to each other seize upon opportunities that leverage design to tell the best stories about our human potential for creation, growth, and unity. 

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• A lovely little swords-into-plowshares story: Superflex Inc is working to commercialize its soft exoskeleton technology that was originally developed with military funding, but instead of equipping soldiers with super-human strength, their latest products will help augment the ailing bodies of the elderly. Superflex says their tech will be so low profile that people can wear it underneath their clothes, which would make it some of the most minimal assistive technology ever.

 

Up in the air: 

• 7-Eleven, more known for their convenient cornucopia of endlessly rotating hot dogs, cigarettes, snack foods and sodas than their high technology ambitions has completed a number of successful aerial deliveries by partnering with the drone company Flirtey. Sometimes by the time the future we've been promised finally arrives, it feels strangely mundane. 

Automatons: 

• Bridgewater Associates is the world's largest hedge fund organization and they're trying to replace much of their management with automated decision making via software. The firm is already known for a workplace atmosphere of intense scrutiny and pressure, so maybe workers there are a little more willing to welcome robot overlords. 
• When it comes to hands-on, blue collar work in the U.S. the mental images of the rugged coal miners of Appalachia or the oil field workers of Texas are invoked more often than most. But just as manufacturing has seen the power and influence of human labor decline, new technologies coming online are going to do the same for the oil industry, with some analysts predicting a 40% reduction in jobs over the next few years. While these jobs may be offset somewhat by new opportunities in software engineering, sensor R&D and other automation inputs, there's no guarantee that those roles will be filled by workers in the same region which could serve to increase the gap between the coastal haves and the central U.S. have nots.

Just a Game: 

• Food as a visual proxy for vitality and power has been a standard in videogames from the very beginning, from Mario popping mushrooms to turkey legs in Castlevania and combat rations in Metal Gear Solid, digital foods assist in telling a story about the aesthetic and experiential world of the game. Eater has an article on the unprecedented realism of food in the latest Final Fantasy release, and how gathering ingredients and "cooking" are intrinsic to the flavor of the game. 
• The wild amount of precision engineering and design research that goes into building a-more-perfect mouse for elite videogamers.

More next week. 

Insights 12.19

Design:

• We live in an era where information overflows the vessel of our attention; an endless glut of "content" pushed out through dozens of platforms, some physical, some digital, some algorithmic bubbles, some self-selected . Lisa Maria Martin makes an argument that designers are responsible for making information legible and honest - that information literacy is inherently a design problem. Filter bubbles and fake news present a huge problem for society and everyone involved will need to make sure their professional efforts work to disarm those traps, rather than playing into them for the sake of clicks and dollars. 

Building Things:

• LiDAR, (a method of sensing distance and three-dimensional forms with light) is essential for best practices in everything from surveying, agriculture, robotics and self-driving cars but these sensor systems are driven by some fairly expensive precision technology. The company Velodyne says they can change all that with some new fabrication methods that output solid state LiDAR sensors - for less than $50 per device. 

Automatons: 

• The New Yorker takes a look at software and robotics devouring jobs and disrupting economies. There's a lot of familiar ideas and data in the piece, but enough good analysis, interesting anecdotes and clever writing to make it worth a read. Lines like "Picture the entire Industrial Revolution compressed into the lifespan of a beagle" stand out as instances of a writer flexing their uniquely human mind to stay ahead of the automation onslaught. 
• For the nerdier, dirtier, deeper dive into what's happening with remapping human / machine relationships in labor and automation, here's a talk from Leif Jentoft of RightHand Robotics, discussing the high costs of system integrators (an aspect seldom mentioned in media coverage of automation tech outside of industry publications) as well and how human behavior encourages spending on predictable robotic solutions (e.g. significantly higher absenteeism following a major sports event or over a weekend). 

Just a Game: 

• A little history of the marketplaces for virtual goods in videogames, and some commentary on how the digital products gamers were shelling out money for had more to do with aesthetic value than "utility" (think costumes instead of stronger weapons). The article goes back to the late 1990s, the days of Ultima: Online and Diablo, but the human tendencies driving these behaviors go back to the earliest points in our history: adorning ourselves with unique objects to project an inner sense of ourselves out into the world to dazzle and impress others. While it seems unusual to pay "real" money for immaterial goods, it's a sliver of economic activity that keeps growing, and companies involved in augmented reality (like Snap Inc.) are placing some big bets on it becoming more significant in years to come. 

Roadmapping the Future: 

• Voice-driven interfaces are growing fast, and Amazon has a strong lead with over 6 million U.S. homes using some version of it's Alexa-enabled Echo products. While millennials are parodied as a screen addicted, hyper-socially networked generation, future generations might be known for a more hermetic flavor of consumer solipsism. If it gets us further away from advertising and attention economies, maybe that's not a bad thing. 

More next week.