Insights 5.08

Design:

• An excellent examination of how we can visualize data and phenomena with qualitative displays and interfaces rather than the default quantitative ones that are typical in software and hardware. Often qualitative data can be just as actionable as quantitative prompts, with the added benefit of reducing visual and cognitive noise- e.g. the number of steps I've taken is not much more meaningful than whether I've been more or less active than usual. Also noteworthy: many of these displays require no screens or electronics at all.

Building Things: 

• Powder Injection Molding (PIM) is a new process that came out of a joint development partnership between BASF and injection molding machine maker Arburg. The technology produces metallic parts with all of the low-cost geometric complexity of injection molding but with surface finishes and durability of closer to machined metal components. Apple has popularized aluminum alloys in consumer electronics and the companies behind this manufacturing process are hoping that PIM could see wide adoption as an alternative to machining, though given Apples "truth in materials" approach, it seems unlikely they would use the process themselves. 
• Apple says they're going to spend around $ 1 billion on advanced manufacturing initiatives in the U.S., though the details on what that will look like are currently quite slim. 

Virtually There: 

• Oculus Rift, now under Facebook's ownership, has pulled the plug on their VR movie/video division. VR tech is pretty solid (if expensive) at this point, but creating content that is unique to the format and compelling enough to move the needle for producers is an immense challenge that hasn't been met so far. There are also some cultural and behavior aspects to passive media like movies that VR gets in the way of: social viewing, multi-tasking, live-tweeting, and so on. In 2017, it's awfully rare that we are ready to sit alone, away from our smartphones and friends and give moving images (immersive or not) our full attention. 

Automatons: 

• Agricultural work has been on the forefront of deploying new technologies for centuries. In 2017 that pattern still holds, with numerous startups working on putting robots into pastures and furrowed fields. GPS guided combines for harvesting grains have been in use for awhile but automating the collection of tender crops like fruit has been a significant challenge only solved through creative approaches, like this apple-sucking robot (the company making the device was spun out of a lab funded by the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission, which is maybe the specific interest group we've ever heard of). The availability of seasonal labor that orchards rely on has been in decline for some time, but concerns about changes in immigration policy are accelerating interest in robotic harvesters. Both nature and technology bend towards the needs and realities of the other - in this case the robots are designed to be delicate with the fruit, but the trees are spaced and tended in certain ways to make robotic (or human) harvesting easier. The tools we make respond to the world as we find it, but also reshape it. 
• Uber seems like a natural winner from the development of reliable self-driving cars, but Christopher Mims at The Wall Street Journal lays out the case against it - namely that the real hurdles of running a self-driving empire will come from building and maintaining those vehicles, not from routing them. Which makes Tesla, along with traditional car makers like Ford and GM, real contenders for killing off the app-first ride-share companies over the long term. 

Roadmapping the Future: 

• This collaboration between Google, Accenture, and a pest control company gives a glimpse of the future of work, where front-line workers are equipped with computational or augmented reality superpowers. The project uses computer vision and machine learning to enable pest-control technicians to snap a photo of a suspicious insect and have it identified via an app. 
• From cyberpunk to postapocalyptic wastelands, often our visions of the future are incredibly bleak. That's not without good reason: the existential challenges we face are real and feel more insurmountable by the day. We've been hearing doom-and-gloom stories about the future for a long time, but it seems to have little impact on how we operate in order to avoid those grim outcomes. Some technologists, artists, and writers are trying to create and advocate for a vision of the future called solarpunk, centered on sustainability, community development, and a more humane style of technology and trade. While it seems impossible to will such change into existence, creating the language and rough templates to suggest such a world is important- just look at how pattern matching, trend spotting (and following) works within the world of tech investments. Whether it's social networks, the Internet of Things, or AI, the world we work at creating is reflective of the ideas being surfaced and repeated in a given era. As powerful as technology is, the manner in which it moves is driven at a deeper level by cultural values and political rationale. The future is not yet decided, and if we can avoid the barren wasteland of dystopian visions through talking up and disseminating ideas for more optimistic ones, it's worth a shot. 

More next week. 

Insights 5.01

Design:

• A patent application and a photo uploaded to Linkedin are among the first indications of what Airbnb's internal design unit Samsara, is up to. The aesthetic of the device definitely has some hallmarks of Lapka: alien styling far from standard consumer electronic practices, contrasting materials and a high level of craft. The device itself is supposed to help travelers by transmitting travel data to them in places where cellular and Wi-Fi service is unreliable. It's hard to tell right now if Airbnb's hardware aspirations will only be available to those on their platform, or if they would venture to make devices for renters/homeowners generally. Platforms like Uber and Lyft have been building hardware for service-provider side users but there's little reason to port those widgets to the general public. It seems inevitable that if Airbnb is serious about pursuing hardware, some of those initiatives will look a lot like "smart home" products, and they'll have to decide whether or not to retail it to the general public. 

Building Things: 

• Two Boston-area tech companies focused on manufacturing technology emerged from stealth mode this past week: Desktop Metal, which has developed some new metal 3D printing tech to greatly reduce cost and increase speed over existing systems, and Tulip, which is working to make manufacturers more nimble and improve quality through sensors, software, and interactive process documentation. Printing metal is notoriously difficult so if Desktop Metal can live up to the hype of printing metal parts even relatively reliably, it could significantly change how and where metal parts with complex geometries are made. Tulip says their systems are in use by Jabil and the Merck Group - massive, experienced companies producing electronics and pharmaceuticals, respectively. Given that those companies are on the cutting edge of manufacturing optimization on both an equipment and organizational level, their positive experience of Tulip's system is pretty compelling. Desktop Metal and Tulip are representative of where manufacturing on the whole is going: towards higher flexibility of production, greater complexity of goods produced, and mixing hands-off automation with hands-on problem solving to generate value. 

 

Automatons: 

• The garment industry is notorious for having awful, exploitative labor practices, with sweatshops flowing to whatever market has the least regulation and the lowest wages. The garment industry has also led to some of the worst workplace disasters in history (e.g. the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 that killed 146 workers, or Rana Plaza collapse in 2013 where 1,129 garment laborers perished). One would expect to see a push for the labor-saving automation found in other sectors, but the amorphous quality of fabric has made cost-effective robotics for apparel construction nearly impossible. The startup Sewbo is hoping to use a new technique where fabric is sprayed with a soluble polymer, stiffening the work in progress to a point where robots can easily and reliably manipulate it for manufacturing. It's an interesting workaround, but so far the apparel industry seems reluctant to deal with the added steps and unknowns of implementing an new process to a very old practice. 

Body/Image: 

• Amazon announced another hardware product in their Alexa-enabled smart home line. It's called Echo Look and adds a camera capable of full body selfies and that can "help you dress better." That last bit, judging your outfits and making recommendations, seems like an absurd idea to us. Fashion is incredibly personal and contextual (occasion, location, season, how you feel, etc.), so the odds that computation is going to lead to better outcomes there is dubious. This is besides the obvious privacy concerns of having a cloud-connected camera watch you dress/undress, building a trove of data on daily fluctuations that could be analyzed in any manner of ways unbeknownst to you, like speculating about your physical and mental health. This article from Wired lays out some other good points about how such (presumably crowdsourced) judging of outfits via algorithm is likely to fail people that intentionally have an androgynous or non-gender conforming style. 
• The clothing business itself is at an interesting juncture, brick-and-mortar retailers are struggling and e-commerce giants like Amazon are making aggressive moves to dominate the sector, filing patents for on-demand clothing fabrication and investing in new ways to gain visibility as a fashion-connected brand through devices like Echo Look. As it stands, Amazon is likely to become the #1 seller of apparel in the U.S. this year, according to analysts. While selling more clothes and capturing extra margin by escaping the need for store rents and staff will be great for their bottom line, Amazon's focus on maximizing speed and minimizing cost might be a bad trend for the environment: 1kg of clothing generates about 23kg of greenhouse gases in attaining that final, fitted form, but we're also burning through clothes at a much faster rate. Across all apparel types, most people are using them only about half as long as we did 15 years ago. 

Up In the Air: 

• DJI, the world's largest consumer drone maker, is working to geofence large swaths of Syria and Iraq with software no-fly zones. These additional no fly zones first appeared in February but were not reported on until recently. The article speculates that the timing may have coincided with a U.S. led offensive into parts of Iraq around that same time. It says something about the expanded capabilities of consumer technology that a company like DJI finds itself drawn into the midst of international relations and military tactics. 

Branded: 

• Marketer and DJ Alyce Currier sharply and succinctly describes the challenges of expanding reach as an individual enterprise, whether as artist, freelancer or micro-business - singing our own praises can seem uncomfortable but is an ever-more vital skill in an era with declining full-time employment. When it comes to art in particular, there are unspoken "rules" about self-promotion that should be upended. To survive, make meaning and share it as broadly as possible, why should the artist not make their own voice a little louder?  

More next week. 

Insights 4.24

Quick reminder: we'll be at the Boston Hardware Workshop next week to talk about product development & prototyping


Design:

• The burgeoning (kinda) legal marijuana market in the United States is generating a lot of design, marketing and branding work to de-stigmatize the substance and shake off the "white guy with Bob Marley posters in his dorm" vibe that has dominated the associated goods for decades. 
• Despite its blue-collar origins, or maybe because of it, Carharrt clothing is popular across a broad demographic swath, from dairy farmers to UX designers. As a utilitarian, anti-fashion brand, it maintains relevancy regardless of what is happening with popular apparel trends. 
• McDonald's unveiled a new set of uniform designs that many have said look a bit like they're out of an authoritarian dystopia. As part of their continued efforts to move away from their image as a cartoon-character laden purveyor of cheap, unhealthy food it makes some sense. Losing the primary colors might also make their workforce feel less like cartoon characters themselves. For us, the most interesting part of this story is the very scale of the design decisions that a large corporation makes: ~850,000 people will be wearing some variant of these new uniforms. For comparison, the entire U.S. Army has about 540,000 people. We don't know yet whether or not the cyborg gray color palette is preparing customers for a more automated future of fast food.

Building Things: 

• An interesting new method for printing medium-to-large envelope parts: injecting thermosetting resins and rubbers into a vat of goo, which acts as a continuous support structure. Like many other additive manufacturing methods, it has fairly poor surface finish, so the notion of it being used for something like office furniture (Steelcase is the corporate sponsor of the research) seems unlikely and the geometric inconsistency makes it problematic for jigs or fixtures. That said, it's early stage research and shows real promise in terms of speed over other methods. 

 

Virtually There: 

• There's a case in Wisconsin right now that claims 1st Amendment Rights protection for Augmented Reality games after Milwaukee County introduced a permit requirement for any games that put AR locations within the county's park system. The permit scope is  pretty extensive: providing on-site medical and security staff, a garbage clean up plan and liability insurance among other things. It's a complex area for public/private interests to be balanced with regulation: on one hand free-assembly is critical for free speech and democratic society, on the other, private companies painting public lands with digital billboards that lure masses of people with "rare" digital goods brings undue and unpredictable burdens for municipalities and their taxpayers. As one of the first AR cases, the outcome could have a huge impact on the nascent industry in establishing early legal precedents.
• The technologies behind accurately reconstructing an individual's voice are becoming highly capable and low cost. While great from an assistive tech perspective, it presents some huge security concerns. Imagine a loved one calls your phone saying they're stranded, asking you to wire them money only to find out later it was simple voice bot running a highly effective voice-based phishing scam. Add voice to the list of things that may appear authentic but can't be automatically trusted. 

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• Telepathy is probably a lot farther off than Elon Musk or Wait But Why would have you think. Here's a level-headed, quick read on the history of brain-machine / brain-computer interfaces and their likely course of development. 

Material Culture: 

• "We have too many things, too many distractions, too many items offered to us..." Those were the words of Reverend Giuseppe Masseroni memorializing Emma Moreno, the world's oldest woman, who lived 117 years. The New York Times looks at the objects in her life. 

More next week.