Insights 10.10

Design:

• Wide swaths of neutral, desaturated colors are commonly used to signal that products are in some way wholesome, natural, ethical, or organic, particularly in the world of fashion. 

Labor Pains: 

• From time to time, there's a news story about a note being found in a mass-produced product, allegedly written by an unknown worker toiling under inhumane conditions. Sometimes those stories can be verified, other times they are constructed projects by activists. Rossalyn A. Warren, writing for Vox, tries to run down the truth of one such story, and in the telling maps out a world of production, abuse, and paranoia about the unknown spaces that so many of our goods appear from. 

Energy: 

• Plastics are shaping up to be a non-negligible contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, predicted to increase at a faster rate than materials like steel and aluminum. It's less clear from the report if some of the rise in plastic demand is a result of product designs moving from metals to plastics, though in any case, we should strive for more efficient practices that minimize the energy going into plastic production. 

• A surprisingly high number of Boston's recently constructed buildings have abysmal energy efficiency ratings.

Waste:  

• A fungus that breaks down polyurethane plastics has been discovered in Pakistan. While stories like this often have an optimistic tone, the reality is that even the most robust plastic destroying microorganisms are only able to address a portion of the problem we have created. Beyond the issue of waste, there is the highly concentrated energy, in the form of oil, that is summarily consumed in the production and transportation of plastic goods. The biological world comes up with novel solutions to break down those materials, though it is unable to re-concentrate the energy. Put another way, the bugs and fungi may help to clean up our messes, but when it comes to avoiding deeper destruction, it is up to us to do the work. 

Archiving: 

• Among archiving tasks, cataloguing the Cambrian explosion of knowledge and noise that is the internet is a truly Herculean one. 

• Thinking about what the La Brea Tar Pits and souvenirs can tell us about how humans conceptualize time, and making our imprint on the world through making and remaking objects.

More next week. 

Insights 10.01

Design:

• The tools available to the artist, engineer, designer, musician, etc. end up shaping the outcome. The viscosity of pre-mixed tube paints changed the significance of gesture for painters, and a building's construction might reveal the precise version of CAD software used in its design. In music, the introduction of new technologies can spur surprisingly lengthy eras of sonic sea change: electric guitars shaping rock, synthesizers fueling new forms of dance, or Auto-Tune changing the sound of vocals across genres. 

Machines for Moving: 

• How scooters rose from oddball novelty to urban transportation solution/nuisance.

 

Energy:  

• An interview with a solar engineer working in Puerto Rico on the demand for alternative energy systems there, and the environmental and economic challenges in building robust, capable networks. 

• Mature manufacturing processes can be surprisingly under-evolved, with dirty byproducts and inefficient energy usage. This is partly because retooling a production system is incredibly capital intensive, and partly because lenient regulators frequently allow manufacturers protected status with provisions that 'grandfather in' outmoded procedures. Researchers at Boston Metal are hoping to clean up the steel industry with new, electric technologies for processing ore. If they are successful at scale, global carbon reductions could be significant. 

• Zinc-air batteries are a promising technology for cleaner, safer energy storage at scale. 

Behavior: 

• Millennials have lower divorce rates than their predecessors, possibly because they are marrying less often: either living unpartnered, or living together without the formalization of marriage. Economic pressures like high housing and education costs also seem to be contributing to a general delay, where alignment between individuals may be more greater, and divorce less likely. 

• Climate change is not a sudden erasure of the world à la annihilating meteor, but the gradual rot of termites, the kind of force that slowly and irreversibly compromises quality of life and comfort, before collapsing fully. Elisa Gabbert looks at how 21st century nihilism about the slow-motion car crash of climate change is manifested in grim memes that ironically clamor for the whole mess to just speed up already.

 

More next week. 

Insights 9.22

Design:

• Toby Shorin on how the internet has fueled a pirhanna-like feeding frenzy on new visual forms almost as soon as they pop up: "Cheap to produce, free to distribute, yet still impossible to meaningfully automate, aesthetic production is in a death spiral. The status associated with aesthetic novelty is eroding, and novelty itself has become increasingly difficult to eke out of a system in which everything is visible, accessible, and relativized." As he points out, the implications for the so-called creative class are huge, with fewer and fewer channels for achieving profit, and styles that might take months or years to develop getting absorbed and remixed over days and weeks. 

Engineering Communities:  

• Model towns, representative of past eras, are being created to help people with dementia.

Communication: 

• Using dramatic 3D animations and all-over green screen to better communicate the dangers of hurricane-induced floodwaters.

Waste:  

• Redesigned trash bins are no match for the cleverness and dexterity of Toronto's raccoon population. Designers of cities and their systems have long sought to control nature, or keep it out of sight, but nature is persistent in its own iterations, and variable to the extreme over the long term. Eventually flood waters will surface the sewage beneath a city's streets, or clever pests draw out the trash we try to hide away. Try as we might, nature reminds us that we are part of it, and not the tidy technological machinery we invent to avoid it.

Material Culture: 

• The story of a surprisingly successful (after a little help from well-funded friends) art collective called Meow Wolf. The collective has transformed from scrappy collaboration into a profitable business machine by building spaces and experiences akin to an avant-garde Disney World. Perhaps their projects flourish and delight precisely because they lack the corporate schlock merchandising factor that we are accustomed to from the classic entertainment world. 

• Andrew Edman (aka the guy who writes this newsletter) has a new project called Artifact Zine. The publication will examine how and why humans make things. 

More next week.