Insights 5.30

Design:

• This is pretty much an ad for Bloomberg Terminal via a history of their keyboards, but if you ignore the marketing effort it's a nice at-a-glance study of interface design for finance-focused users. It demonstrates how useful and efficient tangible interfaces can be when it comes to handling complex task environments if they are purpose-built. 
• There's a new commercially available blue, for the first time in more than 200 years. 

Body/Image: 

• After normcore, there is gorpcore. The "defiantly ugly" trend of wearing similarly basic clothing, but pulled from outdoors retailers like REI and Patagonia. The article cites a sentiment similar to the motivations of normcore: an escape from the myriad complexity of choice, a distancing from designer, and a general comfort derived from both the garments themselves and the soft embrace of conformity. As more of our social activity and outward facing image is constructed, maintained and remixed in digital space, maybe it's just not worth the cognitive and financial costs to fine-tune an IRL aesthetic as well. Maybe it's simply a U.S. flavored version of Airspace for fashion - the minimalist, modernist style that has pervaded the globe as a sort of designer-object Soylent, filling a need but without much life or pleasure in the process. On the other end of the spectrum are the brands working to manufacture desire through manufacturing scarcity itself, with Lululemon creating a retail space for goods that are not available online, and Supreme articles that run in limited editions, gobbled up by bots. In the face of brands trying so hard to get you to care enough collect their wares at a premium, buying some fleece off the rack and getting on with your life seems like a pretty sound idea.
• A really good piece on wearable technology from a more complete, cultural perspective. As the article says, what is really new about "wearables" is their digital capacity for sensing, analysis and signaling, not the overall category itself - the how and where of boundaries between technology/artifact and body/identity has been with us from our earliest human history. We think part of why the 21st century idea of wearable technology has performed poorly is that it has been too much about fragmenting smartphone-style tech to limbs, and less about understanding the deeply personal aspects of bodily identity and how technology may connect to that. 

Big Business: 

• IKEA is the latest corporate giant to create a start up program. Hopefully they have studied the similarly ambitious but now-dissolved programs of Coca-Cola, Target, Turner, & others. With the grim odds of startups scaling at all, and the fact that those that do have often undergone serious pivots in the problems they are trying to solve for, means that there's poor alignment in the incentives for tiny teams and multi-national corporations. In general, we have found that large companies do best by startups when they play the role of strategic investor, rather than incubator/accelerator. As an investor-only, startups have the latitude to pursue their goals on whatever meandering path in necessary for success, and large companies get the chance to snatch up potentially disruptive competitors at preferential prices. 

Machines for Moving: 

• Delivery app Postmates is pushing a new electric scooter program, rolling out initially in Manhattan. This is a continuation of their move to motorize their delivery forces, with or without human direction (they've been piloting little Starship robots in D.C. since early this year). Given that Postmates operates in the somewhat legally murky waters of a contractor based platform, they can't mandate their delivery workers use the new scooters, even if they provided them for free, so they're likely trying to craft the right incentives, develop some opt-in behaviors, and demonstrate drivers using the scooters net more money. After the recent crackdown on electric bikes in Manhattan, that may explain using the city as a starting point. 

Up in the Air: 

• Snap Inc. has acquired a small drone startup, awhile after previous talks with now-defunct dronemaker, Lily Robotics fell through. We can't wait for the "how millennials are ruining drones" pieces that will surely follow any Snap-related drone product (assuming there ever is one).

 

More next week. 

Insights 5.22

Design:

• We wrote a couple of things: why humans make things, the ways mass production has failed human needs, and how we might do things differently in the future, and the tensions that can emerge in developing the user experience aspects of smart home devices that are monetized through data collection and analysis.
• Someone trained a neural network to make up colors and name them, based on training data from Sherwin-Williams. There's not really much of a story here technology wise, but the resulting bland, beige-adjacent colors with derpy names are pretty comical, at least if you're into non sequitur. We can't wait to suggest "Bank Butt" as a color option for a re-branding effort. From a data training perspective it's definitely a flawed proposition - we humans largely derive color names from words we've already connected with various natural phenomena. If the algorithms had used the available RGB data more intelligently (e.g. if G value greater than X, scrape first word of color name from plant database), the names might actually work quite well. 
• Emoji watch: though emoji don't have Western origins, much of the voting power in the Unicode Consortium (which is responsible for emoji standards) is held by U.S. centric tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google. This has led to Westernized interpretations of objects or food that read more as parody than cartoony reportage to those in the know. With so many products and services now reaching a truly global audience at scale, there's increasing need for deep cultural expertise and interpreters to make sure messages don't get mangled or stereotypes reproduced.  

Virtually There: 

• Augmented Reality from the big tech companies has roots in film and animation experiments from the early 1900s. 

Big Business: 

• Etsy is struggling to balance their original mission and status as a B-Corp with demands from shareholders to increase profitability. The transition from startup to publicly traded company can be rough for any team, but ones that are especially entwined with a community built on the founders promises find themselves with even more difficult choices. The same strategies that seem like an obvious path to expanding their market can alienate early, core users. How Etsy navigates this period in its history and the outcome will likely be business school case studies in years to come, and impact how companies handle B-Corp status in the future. 
• A good profile of how electronics accessories maker Anker built a strong brand and business in a highly commoditized market segment.  

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• Another approach to occupational exoskeletons is being piloted by Lowe's: using carbon fiber rods as spring-assist for lifting heavy loads. E-commerce has put increasing demands on warehouses and retailers to do things faster and at ever lower costs. Whether it's Kiva robots moving shelves to human workers or mechanically souped-up shelf-stockers, retail and warehouse environments have emerged as significant spaces for experiments in the future of human/machine collaboration and competition. 

Roadmapping the Future: 

• A new book that seeks to quantify and prioritize efforts to slow climate change. It's important to note that some of the highest-impact solutions are social/cultural shifts, not technological ones: reducing animal protein consumption, educating girls, increasing access to family planning, and reducing food waste. 
• Arctic ice is melting near the Svalbard Seed Vault, which led to widespread reports of flooding within the vault and compromise of its natural archives. Those claims were inaccurate, the vault is holding just fine. 

 

More next week. 

Insights 5.15

Design:

• A video on the designers that created the distinct visual style of southern hip hop album artwork in the 1990s. The text effects, photoshop flames, and composited cars all came together in a way unlike anything before it or since. In a way, it was an aesthetic celebration of suddenly available power: for rappers getting rich quickly: showing off assets of an upper crust lifestyle, for designers: having powerful graphic design tools that allowed an individual or small team to put together something quite complex. 
• Once upon a time, the on-screen logos for TV networks were physical objects or entire mechanisms. In some ways we have come full circle, with digital brands utilizing physical devices as "immersive experiences" that connect users IRL. Brands are a flat circle. 
• That possibly concept art/possibly marketing stunt all-black clothing and accessory subscription project that we covered a few weeks ago is apparently real. 

Building Things: 

• The latest from LEGO on their quest to replace the petroleum-sourced ABS plastic they use for their products with a bioplastic. They seem to have ruled out polylactic acid (PLA), a common material for consumer 3D printers due to its propensity to "creep" and shift form over time. LEGO uses 70,000 metric tons of ABS every year, and if they can make bioplastics a reality for mass production, it could have a massive impact on consumer plastic goods in general. As people who design products for the advantages and constraints of plastics everyday, we're genuinely, nerdily, excited about bioplastics becoming that much closer to a mass-production reality. 
• There must be something in the air- more and more people are discussing how 3D printing is on a clear trajectory towards living up to the term additive manufacturing: making end-use components and products as an alternative to traditional methods like injection molding, stamping, and so on. Christopher Mims in The Wall Street Journal stress tests some 3D printed shoe soles and a metal hinge from Desktop Metal, and Jon Bruner interviews Max Lobvosky of Formlabs on how 3D printing will expand to include more and more industries. While the story of 3D printing supplanting other mass production methods has been a hyped story for awhile, advances in speed, material science, and methods are starting to deliver on some of that promise, at least for goods that require some degree of customization.

Energy: 

• Some good news: U.S. households are using less electricity. The highly-efficient LED lighting displacing incandescent and fluorescent bulbs is claimed as the cause. 

Branded: 

• A really good read from one of the founders of K-HOLE, the group of self-described cultural strategists on how big corporations sought their art-world-bred cultural acuity but typically (unsurprisingly) de-fanged their proposals, tossing away the meat of their concepts in favor of surface treatments and mere nods in the direction of something subversive. Anyone who has ever worked in such contexts will find things in common to cringe about; corporations claim to seek to understand human needs, desires, and cultural trends but actually accepting those influences or even presenting those ideas often feels like an oil-meets-water scenario. 

Data Logging: 

• Apple has acquired the sleep tracking hardware company Beddit, likely in a bid to appease people that have a deep desire for round-the-clock quantified self analytics (the Apple Watch has had some criticism from quantified self die-hards as its battery life precluded round-the-clock use). Adding sleep tracking to the buffet of data available will add value for some, but we'd bet that Apple has more in mind for this asset. 

 

More next week.