Insights 7.24

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Insights 7.24

Design:

 

Machines for Moving: 

 

Big Business: 

  

Upgrading Ourselves: 

 

Material Culture: 

 

  

More next week. 

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Insights 7.19

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Insights 7.19

Design:

 

Communication: 

  • A discussion of the privacy/safety concerns around Snap Maps. With any social platform that has a monetization model dependent on user data, there are significant risks of profit-driven surveillance adversely affecting users and communities. One thing that is compelling to us about the map feature is that it bridges digital connection and physical connection in a more real time way, by showing proximity of friends or heatmapping interesting events happening nearby- it's making the sort of stream-of-experience social media posting we're accustomed to witnessing into something more participatory and communal. 
  • A compelling case for why more emoji may make communication more difficult and less natural. For one thing, the top-down approach of the Unicode Consortium is antithetical to how language develops from the bottom-up, in specific cultural or professional contexts.  
  • Facebook is trying to get private groups on their platform to be more of a thing. For a company that has made much of connecting the world, pushing context collapse (all of your various social groups having their separating walls eroded, aunts, uncles, bosses and ex-lovers all in one "place"), it's an unusual move. Maybe the toxic conflict that arises from context collapse is reflecting poorly on user experience and creating a slow pattern of attrition- from outside of their organization it's difficult to say what the real reasoning behind this push is. 

  

Just A Game: 

 

Building Things: 

 

More next week. 

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Insights 7.08

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Insights 7.08

Design:

  • If you collect counterfeit phones as art, (that may or may not be within regulatory compliance and also sport some extra features: lighter, stun gun, etc.), it can be difficult to get them from their production sites in China to another continent. What's compelling about this approach to design and production is that it is so swift and localized, responding to needs or fads within a market as close to real time as is currently possible. As an art project it's a little less sensible. Simply removing objects from one cultural context as useful objects to place them in another as art to point to them as a sort of absurd curiosities is pretty tone deaf, and could be done with novelties from pretty much anywhere in the world. 
  • Tony Fadell (of Apple iPod & Nest-founder fame) talks to Fast Company about his anxiety surrounding the unintended consequences of design in digital goods/communication and fears about it alienating people from one another. These are hardly new concerns (that theme has been Sherry Turkle's stock-in-trade for years now), and they are far from consensus. The internet-in-your-pocket also allows immigrants across the globe a low cost way to stay in touch, helps disenfranchised groups support each other and organize, and incubates subcultures that challenge the status quo. In our opinion the more clear-cut moral hazard of consumer electronics is on the supply side: current labor conditions around the globe and a lack of environmental stewardship- especially when you consider electronic goods produced at the scale of iPods and Nest thermostats. This is an even more striking omission of concerns given that part of the root-problem analysis of the digital alienation question, as discussed in the article, was assigned to design myopia from homogeneous design teams made up of young white men with no children. If designers really want to make better choices about what they build and how it impacts society, we need to both have more representative teams and consider the larger contexts. One of our founders recently wrote about how design affects labor, and how we might become better about considering not just user pain, but producer pain.

 

Roadmapping the Future: 

  

Upgrading Ourselves: 

  • One thing that could hold back a cyborg future of technologically-enhanced bodies and brains: electronic interference causing those implants to go on the fritz. Gizmodo has a story on the risks involved in putting mission-critical electronics into the complex systems of the world, highlighting a case where it's believed a man was thrown into convulsions by his brain implant reacting to crossing the security scanner threshold of a Best Buy store. One can imagine that trying to error-proof sensitive implants becomes a staggering challenge when you think about global travel, or that unregistered and unregulated devices that may be emitting signals illegally. 

 

Archiving: 

 

More next week. 

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