Insights 7.24

Design:

• We've had a blurb on our website for awhile that says we're not the team to restyle a toaster for the latest trend, so we appreciated this account of how good design (based in function, understanding of user behaviors and pain points) contributes to making a toaster something more than just aesthetically in fashion. In this case it's a feature called "a bit more" that cooks whatever you're toasting just a little more. It's a simple problem solved in a simple way: no apps, no timer display screen, no internet connection required. It is technology not for technology's sake, but genuinely in the service of the person using it. 

Machines for Moving: 

• Self-driving cars have some degree of spatial "awareness" but don't have any ability to make perceptual judgments, leading to situations where they can be deceived by something like a 2D image of a cyclist. Having a suite of different sensor types helps to mitigate this trompe l'oeil scenario, but there are concerns about how well they can deal with real cyclists, where movement, behavior and shape is much more fluid, which makes reliable detection difficult. One proposed solution is to add devices to bikes so that they can "talk" to autonomous cars, but for many cyclists that's a solution that is too cumbersome and costly to be acceptable for many city-dwellers.

Big Business: 

• A solid article on how technology companies (once disruptive startups themselves) have developed powerful systems to stave off challengers, either through well-timed R&D funded with their deep pockets, or aggressive acquisition strategies to consolidate power. This isn't necessarily bad for startups- they may have better odds to cash out quickly, but it's likely bad for customers/end users, who find themselves in a market with prolonged periods of reduced choice. 
• AlphaBay and Hansa Market, two large marketplaces on the "Dark Web" were shut down after a federal operation wrapped up and key operators of the platforms were arrested. According to reports on the sweep, AlphaBay had accumulated around 200,000 users and 40,000 vendors, making it about ten times larger than The Silk Road marketplace that was shut down in 2013. 

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• A company is Wisconsin is slated to be the first U.S. company to implement microchipping of workers. A spokesperson for the company is quoted as saying "It's the next thing that's inevitably going to happen, and we want to be a part of it." While this is a voluntary procedure, the fraught history of U.S. employer-labor relations and statements about "inevitability" should make people wary of such invasive, semi-permanent modifications to the body being part and parcel of jobs. When you end your workday and clock out, your body should go back to being yours alone - it seems hard to say that anything other than that arrangement should be viewed as an acceptable inevitability. The bottom line on the current generation cyborg bio-hacks is that they actually provide very little utility to the individual, while providing big privacy risks that would only benefit an aggregator of such information. 

Material Culture: 

• We're all producing and consuming more plastic than ever before, with as much plastic waste created between 2002 and 2015 as was made between 1950 and 2002. The biggest culprit seems to be packaging: water bottles, individually wrapped snacks, soaps, and so on. In the face of such a massive scale of waste, recycling does little to stem the tide. Only serious efforts focused reduction could make a dent in the problem. It's a reminder that most of the marketing promises around 'convenience' are really just shifting problems down the road. Designers and engineers should think long and hard on exactly what is at stake when they bring a product into the world. 

 

More next week. 

Insights 7.19

Design:

• Office furniture behemoth Steelcase just put out some research on natural (or natural-feeling) materials and how they may help with worker well-being due to deep human affection for being in and among nature. While there's benefits for humans (and non-humans) experiencing sensory novelty (natural or otherwise) within our environments, it seems a stretch to make claims that office furniture can give you anything near the same benefit to actually spending time outdoors in fresh air and sunlight. A better solution is to give people the tools and equipment to be more productive while in the office so there's more available time to be out of it. 
• A paper on how to design user interaction spaces within virtual reality to minimize muscle fatigue and strain. (FYI the link is a PDF) 

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: 

• The story of how the Oregon Trail series of computer games were developed, including the regrets of one designer/developer: that more sophisticated and nuanced game mechanics around how the game's protagonist interacts with Native peoples were not finished in time to make it into the version that shipped. That was in the 1980s, and unfortunately much of how mainstream video games deal with the messy complexities of society and culture have largely failed to improve. For instance, the flattening of the myriad of issues involved in The Vietnam War into violent 1st person entertainment spectacle or that the massively successful zombie game franchise Resident Evil took a controversial turn when it used (non-specific) Africa as the backdrop and featured its white protagonist shooting down zombies that were mostly black and throwing in a mishmash of tribal imagery and village tropes for dramatic effect rather than cultural context. In a medium that is continually trying to equate its aesthetic and conceptual value with established art forms like cinema, theater, and novels, creators can and should do a better job of delving deep into research and creating (no pun intended) three-dimensional characters and interactions. This gap in understanding will have more painful consequences as we move into an era of powerfully heightened, immersive experiences in VR and AR. When there have been games that critically examine how violence impacts cultures around the world, it has typically come from artists coming to the medium, rather than the big-budget games becoming more deeply artistic.

Building Things: 

• Desktop Metal, the startup developing 3D printers for metal that markedly lower cost than existing systems, just raised another round of investment that puts them into the "Unicorn" category of having a one billion dollar or greater valuation. There's a definite shift in the 3D printing industry underway, with more money and R&D efforts going to create production systems, not just prototyping systems- a movement towards manufacturing methodologies that are increasingly without tooling and on demand. 
• U.S. customers say they want to buy more goods manufactured domestically, but are unwilling to pay much more to do so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

More next week. 

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: 

• The professional practices of Futurists, whether commercial or academic, are at their best a way of envisioning a multitude of futures that can coordinate current strategic and tactical moves in order to arrive at the best outcome. At their worst, they are indulgences to reassure nervous corporations, a sort of McKinsey-meets-crystal ball stunt that enriches a few but leaves on-the-ground practices unchanged. Because so much of the work of futurists is intangible, and by definition, flung out into a distant horizon, much of their work is invisible to those outside that particular industry, so this post from a practicing futurist questioning the value, role and impact of future-conjuring work is an interesting perspective to see. 
• Related, On the Media's most recent episode surveys the landscape of the future, both the environmental and social realities that we may inherit due to climate change. It's a fantastic episode where the hosts are talking with science fiction writers, exploring why we need to spend more time imagining (realistically flawed) attempts at utopia instead of reveling in the nihilism of a predestined disaster. 

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: 

• Two perspectives on how the things we keep or discard reflect philosophies on life, ideas about our own identities, and the material culture of a given place and time: one looking at how Marie Kondo's minimalism connects to how we create and consume digital artifacts like photos, and another that looks at closets as a site of "residual media" and offers a bit of historical context for emergence of secreted-away storage. As the closet piece points out, in our fast moving, high-tech filled era, closets also serve as a graveyard of designed obsolescence, a tangle of vestigial cords, embodied digital archives and inferior methods of capturing image, audio, and video. More than a junk pile, it represents ourselves over time, exploring the world and our identities as we move toward the self that fits us best. 

 

More next week.