Insights 4.17

 

Design:

• "Google has a new drawing tool that's extremely cool and also a little bit depressing."
• It won't be long until complex, autonomous or semi-autonomous machines become a regular sight in our daily lives, whether it's in our offices or on our streets and sidewalks. As we step into a system where robots are living out in the world and not just on factory floors, new design and engineering concerns also arise, like making signage legible to humans and machines. In the future we may have something like autonomous-friendly building codes layered on top of those designed to serve human needs, with things like elevators or tangible interfaces having an invisible aspect for machine access.
• Perhaps a conceptual art project, possibly a goods-by-subscription startup, or maybe a parody of designer aesthetics and Silicon Vallery startups, Lot 2046 has been making some ripples on social media. The project is by one of Vadik Marmeladov of Lapka fame, the tiny design firm that was acquired by Airbnb in 2015, Vadik left in 2016). 

Branded: 

• A Burger King TV advertisement exploited Google's voice interface control, triggering devices within range to start spouting information about hamburgers. An immediate and predictable backlash over the stunt has given the company even greater free press exposure, but it does underscore some exploit vulnerabilities inherent in voice interfaces, akin to early hacking practices of phone phreaking, where tone generation could grant free access to long distance calling. We would not be surprised if this one-trick-pony marketing gimmick leads to new regulatory law from the FCC banning such practices in the future. 

Building Things: 

• Fastenal, the manufacturer, distributor and reseller of construction/industrial supplies has seen an increase in sales, in part from their vending machineswhere you can pick up a can of WD-40, a respirator, welding supplies or whatever other relevant manufacturing errata you might need. The machines have been around for awhile, but their usage has grown significantly (Fastenal now has over 64,000 vending machines). It's the sort of dull but incredibly valuable innovation that escapes many startups working in IoT or technology more broadly. 
• There are probably more online enabled, direct-to-consumer mattress companies than anyone needs, but the story of Purple is more interesting than most. They've bootstrapped their company rather than taking VC dollars and seem to have some genuinely novel intellectual property that emerged from their previous venture developing wheelchair seating to reduce risk of pressure sores. The article reads more like a PR release for the company than a real dig into their operations, but well worth a read for anyone looking at non-VC paths to growth.
• There's about $17 MM worth of titanium on a 787 according to Boeing. They've been working with Norsk Titanium to print some of these titanium parts to near net shape and cut costs. 

 

Virtually There: 

• A good piece from Polygon on the abuse risks for Virtual Reality from people who have been using it in therapeutic and psychological research contexts for many years. Even if you're not particularly interested in VR, the article has an interesting chart showing adoption rates of different technologies, and how the most influential inventions of our era have reached wide usage at a breakneck pace, potentially outrunning society's ability to adapt via conventions, norms and regulations. 

Machines for Moving: 

• Marble is running a small pilot program of their food delivery robots in San Francisco. The robots are pretty big, fairly slow and require human oversight for now. 
• 35% of exports by value travel via air freight, which only amounts to 1% by volume. 
• An intriguing project from IBM & Local Motors (the company that's been working on 3D printing car bodies) to create small, autonomous shuttle buses with an aim to serve people with disabilities. A careful reading of the article also highlights that part of the need for such a service comes from weak ADA guidelines for public transportation, and underdeveloped, underfunded public transportation more generally. While a diversity of solutions to transportation problems is helpful for driving innovation, private partnerships can leave municipalities and regions suddenly exposed and residents stranded in leaner times. 
• The Boston-area bike-sharing company Hubway offered up ridership data for anyone to crunch and examine, and one analysis found that the "loneliest bike" was ridden for a brief 4.18 minutes. 

More next week. 

Insights 4.10

Design:

• The aesthetics of anarchy: an April Fool's experiment on reddit that granted users the ability to contribute (one pixel at a time) to a big blank canvas quickly transformed into a collaborative, competitive work, flickering in and out of visual cohesion. The article maps out a chronology of activity and how trends from various factions played out over the course of the experiment. It's probably unwise to draw any big conclusions about our collective prospects as a species based on a digital mural from an internet forum, but it has some positive indications for our ability to work collectively with great agility to make something from nothing. With reddit's periodic reputation for hosting hate speech and doxxing campaigns it's also a glimmer of hope that the final version of the canvas contained no racist/hate symbols (this is according to the article, we haven't scoured the totality of it ourselves to confirm). On the other hand it's disappointing that given a blank slate, mostly people pulled together to recreate brands, videogame characters, flags, and sports logos rather than producing original concepts. From a speed to organization perspective reproducing well-known imagery is certainly a lower bar to clear for aligning efforts. It also speaks to why people respond so strongly to the 21st century readymade of the internet meme: a set of sights, sounds and words that speak to what we already believe to be true, rather than challenging us to dive deeper, think critically and invent for ourselves. We'll be thinking about this experiment for awhile. 
• A concise analysis of how aggressive ad placements and newsletter signups are turning activity in browsers into a nuisance-laden chore, making the web less legible. 

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• Harvard Business Review on how augmented reality devices are giving a significant boost to worker productivity in healthcare and service technician roles. An aspect of these 'augmented workforce' practices that will need studying in coming years is how stepping in and out of these altered contexts could affect health in terms of mood, sleep, or fatigue. While there's no reason to automatically suspect occupational AR systems are detrimental, spending extended amounts of time in a sort of overclocked cognition seems worth understanding better before we all plug-in for productivity's sake. 

Body/Image: 

• We said back in July that Taser was on an aggressive campaign to gain market dominance in the category of police body cameras, and they just made their biggest move yet: rebranding to Axon and offering free cameras and services (for one year) to any police departments in the U.S. that wants them. 

Big Business: 

• E-commerce continues to hammer away at brick-and-mortar retailers. A Credit Suisse analyst is predicting 9,000 or so store closings this year in the U.S.(worse than during the 2008 housing collapse and recession). The shift from jobs dealing in the local and tangible, to the digital and distributed is a trend that is going to keep reshaping communities and industries for the foreseeable future, despite political efforts to reinforce old notions of borders. 
• The unique problems and solutions of large, ambitious organizations: how Google built their own processing chips so they wouldn't need to build as many new data centers. 

Behavior: 

• Looking at the psychology of self via Tough Mudder to understand why so many people are willing to pay for the opportunity to experience discomfort, pain and injury. In short, modern humans feel disconnected from regular awareness of their bodies and clouded by a hundred tiny anxieties. Pain can bring hyper-focused flow states for the brain, and a grounded sensation in our flesh and bones. 
• Lenders in China are studying large swaths of smartphone user data to determine risk and set terms for loans. According to their analytics, iPhone users are more reliable than Android users, and people who let their phones linger at low battery levels are more prone to repayment issues. 

More next week. 

Insights 4.05

Design:

• Gilbert Baker, the artist/activist behind the design of the iconic rainbow flag representing the LGBTQ community has passed away. As far as visual culture and politics go, it's difficult to overstate the impact that this particular flag has had in uniting people under a common physical and philosophical banner.

Communication: 

• Now that your Internet Service Provider can sell your search data, tools like Noizy (a plugin that spends its time creating garbage data to obscure real activities) are becoming more popular. Add such traffic to the deep hum of autonomous, inhuman noise of the 21st century internet: bots crawling, scanning, tweeting, and emailing to no one in particular. 
• Using encryption is important for privacy and security but it also leads to some frustrating complications. Quinn Norton, writing for Backchannel recounts how the development of a romantic relationship via encrypted channels made the usual way of proving the relationship for immigration purposes via documents impossible. 

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• A company in Sweden has a program for microchipping workers (it's opt in). The company is a "startup hub" hosting more than 100 companies- so far 150 people (out of 2,000 or so at the facility) have taken part in the program and can use the implanted chip as a keycard to gain access to secured parts of the complex. While this program is voluntary, it's not hard to imagine companies or government agencies that have an interest in detailed data on the comings and goings of staff making something like this a requisite part of their employment contracts. Microchipping humans seems extra-creepy due the the bodily aspect, but perhaps we should be more concerned about the less visible but similarly invasive surveillance technologies like facial recognition or data-brokering. Whether it's vice clauses, non-competes or non-disclosure agreements, employers have enjoyed a fairly expansive set of powers and legal controls over worker freedoms in and outside the workplace. If automation fears pan out, and it does lead to intensifying job scarcity there's little reason to think some employers would pass up the opportunity to police the lives of laborers even more as their bargaining power is reduced. 
• Research into how we see color and the development of novel lens arrangements can give us the ability to see a more complete and true spectrum of color. This seems like a pretty great little superpower to have, we're sure Pantone is excited about the possibilities.  

Energy: 

• Demand for lithium has skyrocketed as more devices and machines rely on the element for energy storage, increasing exploration and mining efforts globally.  In the U.S. those activities are taking place in Nevada, altering the landscape and fortunes of 21st century prospectors.

Engineering Communities: 

• In markets where property values have been climbing rapidly (Boston, Manhattan, San Francisco, etc.) there's a different variety of neighborhood blight: strings of vacant properties that occur when landlords drastically increase rents while holding out for tenants willing to pay that premium. When the economics are such that this waiting game is more lucrative than renting the properties at recent rates, the other properties, residences and businesses in those neighborhoods suffer. Some cities have proposed having rental deadlines under penalty of fines to encourage would-be property hoarders to find tenants in the here and now.
• Heatmapping noise levels across cities and towns shows the impact of major highways and airports. While noise seems like it begins and ends as an inconvenience, studies show that it may have deeper impacts: affecting learning and overall health.

Big Business: 

• The founder of Roland Corporation, Ikutaro Kakehashi, has died. While most obituaries of the man only mentioned his achievements in creating and advancing electronic music technology, his company was/is one of those quintessential Japanese organizations that took on an incredible breadth of product categories (milling machines, vinyl cutters, dental tools and 3D printers) and executed on them exceptionally well, over and over again across decades. That said, it's fair that his contributions to electronics for music are noted as his principal legacy. Some of the devices he was responsible for, like the TR-808, led to fundamental changes in the sound of electronic music the world over and music overall. If you listen to hip-hop, EDM, or pop music - many of those sounds can be traced back directly to innovations from Roland and Ikutaro Kakehashi. Technology that can put such a deep and lasting ripple into the waters of culture, birthing new genres and subcultures is something rare. 

More next week.