Insights 8.20

 Design:

• How to build and outfit a home using Universal Design principles.
• Mapping pocket sizes in women's clothing compared to men's clothing. 
• An amazing long read from Fred Scharmen: a history of designing around how we might live beyond earth, and the potential psychological difficulties of becoming dislocated in space, apart from our usual frames of reference. 

Body/Image:  

• Los Angeles' mass transit management is moving to implement airport-style body scanners for their subways. 

Mapping Markets: 

• Alexis Madrigal for The Atlantic looks into the weird world of selling hyper-specific goods online that arise from searches and the best guesses of software: "Perhaps actual people have always had an infinity of different desires, but it was never possible to satisfy each and every one. Now, though, under certain circumstances, Walmart.com or Amazon can host hundreds of thousands of products, each designed to ensnare ... well ... maybe just one customer." 
• Farmers are gaining leverage against gargantuan agriculture companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, due to changes in farming business strategies, namely technology for better tracking of commodity markets and expanding storage capacity.  

Up in the Air:  

• The unpredictable and deadly airstrikes in Syria have led to a staggering number of deaths and injuries. Volunteers have put together their own ad hoc early alert networks with human and digital watchers, with human plane spotters, sensors, data analysis and phone apps. Early research suggests these efforts have already saved hundreds of lives. 

Communication 

• Online marketers are dialing down efforts devoted to social media as returns diminish, controversy swells, and daily active users decline across multiple platforms. Instead, marketers are turning their attention back to search engine optimization. Brian Feldman, writing for New York Magazine, suggests that SEO-oriented strategies (while riddled with problems) is ultimately about providing relevant information, and is preferable to the 'reptile brain' emotional hijacking approaches that played so well on social media. 

On Screen: 

• Researchers at Stanford have created a system to automatically synthesize realistic sounds to nearly perfectly sync up with digital animation.
• On the Media has a great episode this week that explores the rise of video game (and life in general) live streaming on Twitch as a major mass media development. 

More next week. 

Insights 8.13

Design:

• Liz Bowen with a roaming, thoughtful piece on design, disability, and avoiding the worst Darwinist impulses of short-sighted, inhumane technologists: "The ideal disability society, however, is the one envisioned by universal design, a contemporary architectural and educational movement aimed at making social environments accessible to all kinds of bodies and minds." 
• The bulk of design discourse found online is (perhaps unsurprisingly) shallow. 

Virtually There:  

• After billions of dollars in funding, and years of development, tech journalists are finally getting their hands on Magic Leap's AR technology. The product is real, but also isn't yet living up to the hype.

Automatons:  

• Two perspectives on the increasing capabilities of robots, and how humans relate to them: Joi Ito argues that the Western adversarial approach to robots is based in philosophical differences, while Sherry Turkle cuts down the notion that intimacy, or any true salve for loneliness can come from digital beings. Both seem to be in agreement that our understanding of these machines is off-base, rooted in human projections of our hopes and fears, rather than blueprints for how a future society filled with clever machines will pan out.

Labor Pains: 

• Tech platforms for ‘gig economy' work tout the freedom of choosing where, when, and how to work as unique benefits to platform workers, unavailable in conventional 9-to-5 employment, but in that trade workers find themselves subject to intense scrutiny and tracking. Caroline O'Donovan writes about how UpWork, among others, are in the surveillance business as much as they are in the business of connecting buyers and sellers of labor. 
• Manual labor jobs all produce a certain level of bodily wear and tear, but professions like construction, agriculture, or fishing carry greater risks of serious on-the-job injury. Those injuries can land workers in a hospital or clinic, with a prescription to opioid painkillers, substantially increasing their risk of developing addictions over their white-collar peers. 

Seen/Unseen: 

• On modularity as a particularly modern condition, and how that modularity hides (sometimes troubling) complexity, via an examination of global supply chains and logistics.

Waste:  

• An article on the slight resurgence of repair shops with the observation that repair efforts begin at the birth of a product: "Buy-in from the major retailers is key, because the repair process actually starts long before a product breaks. It begins on the assembly line. Many corporations still pursue a strategy of planned obsolescence, designing a product to break so consumers need to buy more. Others build in ways to repair the product easily."  
• A hopeful story of finding better ways to live while wasting less: "Combined with rules that limit outdoor watering and pricing that incentivizes conservation, Santa Fe has reduced its per capita consumption from 168 gallons per day in 1995 to 90 today." The prospect of living in desert regions of the world as droughts grow in length and intensity seems untenable, but smart choices at the community level can raise the bar on conservation. Beyond the personal anecdotes and policy tidbits, the story provides a sketchy prototype for how to live with the looming threat of destruction, how to build solutions for yourself and your neighbors, even as your national government goes astray. 

More next week. 

Insights 8.07

Design:

• IKEA is pushing back on the minimalist interiors trend in their latest catalog, and with a series of videos on "collectors" advocating for the value of being surrounded by stuff (at least when held in IKEA containers). The videos could easily be mistaken for content from The Onion: In one video, the subject says "I don't even have eyebrows, so that's, I think, proof of how, like, my aesthetic is quite minimalistic." 
• On the design of high-end consumer electronics like Apple's iPhones (and so much more) from Jay Owens: "We touch our phones 2,617 times a day, a 2016 study by DScout suggests - nearly a million touches a year. Each tap, type, swipe and click produces a reaction of some sort - communicated through touch haptics, not just visually; we stroke our devices, and they purr and give us dopamine and a sense of agency back."

Body/Image: 

• A company called Naked Labs is now shipping a full-body scanning system that monitors changes in your body's form and composition, designed for everyday home use as a souped-up alternative to the traditional scale. While health and fitness are obvious use cases, it's easy to imagine how the technology (with some modifications) could dovetail with digitized products and services, like automatically updating your dimensions for a bespoke clothing company or recommending the best off-the-shelf fit from Amazon's offerings. 

Machines for Moving: 

• Uber is pulling the plug on their self-driving truck program.

Energy: 

• An article on air-conditioning's role in climate change, which is worth reading for its brief history of how our ancestors dealt with the oppressive heat and humidity of summers past.

Material Culture:

• Sci-Fi writers spend their days imagining the look and feel of possible futures: societal change reflected in material change. Futures of either gleaming technological possibilities or dismal, post-apocalyptic wastelands, two poles that represent the best and worst outcomes of our attempts to reconfigure our reality to suit us. The likely future is somewhere between those extremes: a world with profoundly positive changes, along with patches of blight where we have carelessly blotted out resources for good, or greatly reduced the quality of existing options. As an example of what he calls "disaster aesthetics," Willy Blackmore looks at how climate change is impacting the color and texture of lumber, with beetles rampaging for longer and longer spans as winters contract. 

More next week.