Insights 11.05

Design:

• A history of athleisure, from early rubber-soled tennis shoes to contemporary yoga pants.

• Publishers are hoping that a one-handed book design (with a reading structure more akin to scrolling) can boost book sales, particularly among younger readers. 

Body/Image:  

• Rob Horning analyzes how the synthesized, digital-being 'influencer' Lil' Miquela connects with questions of race, immigration, the American Dream of reinvention, and the erasure that comes with it: "...Miquela is a visual expression of an algorithmic sublime, a representation of the possibility that the history of racialization can be reversed not through struggle but through the administration of statistically driven processes that can eliminate the way any bodies have been marked socially and historically."

• Given that humans are by and large such visually-oriented creatures, what does it mean for our collective ability to reckon with reality when synthesized "deep fakes" are growing both more common and more compelling in their purported authenticity? In part, the dramatic increase in the fidelity of digital fakes is due to the increase in data throughput that graphics processors are capable of, compared to their now primitive-seeming counterparts. The dangerous potential of easy, convincing fakes has more than just political talk show pundits rattled: DARPA launched a program in 2016 to keep tabs on how quickly evolving techniques could pose a risk to security interests, or be used to foment aggression in response to acts that in reality, never occurred. 

Energy: 

• A lack of proper charging infrastructure, and the immense cost involved in building it, is slowing the adoption of electric cars globally. As with other utopian projects, inserting a new technology, even if transformative, is not enough to fundamentally change the system it lives within—many incremental steps to shift constraints oblique and adjacent, are also necessary.  

• Reports vary, but by almost any measure, the wild success of cryptocurrencies have had a worrisome impact on emissions, due to the dirty power inputs behind the electricity the "mining" activity requires. A new report claims that literal mining of valuable metals like gold and silver is less environmentally damaging (at least from an emissions standpoint) than the average cryptocurrency rig is, on a dollar-to-dollar basis.  

Communication:  

• How a slogan that starts with the weirder, more paranoid fringes of the internet can end up as an official part of presidential communications in a matter of weeks. 

More next week. 

Insights 10.29

Design:

• A poetic and thoughtful list of 250 things an architect should know, ranging from "the rate at which that carpet you specified off-gasses" to "how people pee."

• In our mass produced world, designers and engineers typically build averaged products that attempt to serve the full human range of needs, however, more tailor-made solutions can often serve us better. Customized goods built to suit an individual's body are a common example of how bespoke processes can make our lives more comfortable, but we can extend those practices to things like interfaces and alerts as well. This study of children responding to alarms (one with tone only, the other with their mother's recorded voice) suggests we are wired to respond strongly to personal stimuli, rather than generic prompts. 

Roadmapping the Future:  

• An odd project seeking to genetically engineer cats that will change color when in the presence of radiation, to warn our future descendants of the nuclear waste we are leaving behind. Many have attempted to design symbols, mythologies, and architectures that would prevent the careless wanderer of the future from radiological doom, and while these endeavors may verge on the absurd, they underscore the long, complex consequences of our scientific and technological efforts as a civilization that begin in optimism. 

Big Business: 

• Increased government spending is a significant contributor to recent economic growth in the U.S., according The Wall Street Journal. Military project spending is a big piece of that growth pie, which tends to benefit manufacturers, engineering firms, and technology providers over other sectors. Given that the U.S. has effectively been running intensive, continuous warfare operations around the globe since 2001, the flow of money to be made from the military-industrial complex is driven less by new geopolitical events, and more by presidential proclivities. 

• Tariffs set by the Trump administration are having big impacts on the valuations of large, consumer companies like iRobot. 

Waste:  

• Now that China has drastically cut the amount of low-quality recyclable materials they are accepting from abroad, other countries (primarily in Southeast Asia) are absorbing some of the demand. Despite new outlets popping up, net-exporter recycling programs from nations like the U.S. and France are struggling to make the economics work. Ultimately, anything fabricated ends up somewhere. Plastic production rates need to go down (through a combination of reduced demand and more circular systems) unless we are all willing to have the landfill begin at our own doorstep. Interestingly, Chinese entrepreneurs are buying or building material reprocessing plants in the U.S., to bring recycled material standards up to the level that China will accept, and profit in the process. 

Material Culture: 

• A fascinating and weirdly beautiful viral social media trend in China referred to as the "flaunt your wealth challenge" amounts to a photo or video of a fallen person, surrounded by the artifacts and objects of their day-to-day life. It's a sort of living, 21st century version of ancient ancestor practices of being buried or entombed with their earthly possessions. 

More next week. 

Insights 10.23

Design:

• Motorola is partnering with iFixit to provide repair tools for their products, a once common practice for companies, but a remarkably rare one today. 

• How to design for calmness.

Roadmapping the Future:  

• Fiction is a common tool for prototyping and prophesying possible futures. We linked to an article last week about the staleness of cyberpunk dystopias, so this reading list from Jay Owens of fresher future genres is well-timed.

Up In the Air: 

• Government officials in Chengdu, China, want to install an artificial moon in the form of a satellite.

Communication:  

• Two stories of what happens when modern day communication tools like social media or online gaming chat intersect with state power and violence: one about the (allegedly state-sponsored) twitter mobs that regularly went after Jamal Khashoggi, and another about how SWAT teams are duped into being agents of annoyance or even death by internet bullies. 

Archiving:  

• On populism, what architecture is deemed worthy of preservation, and how the great reconfiguring of retail leaves behind big empty shrines to 20th century mass consumption. 

• Contrary to popular conception of ancient Greek and Roman artifacts and architecture, their world was not built in Spartan white, but bold technicolor. Whether or not museums should present the full polychromatic versions remains in debate. 

Bias and Brains:   

• A study looking at behavior that is stereotypically coded as masculine or feminine suggests that feminine-coded behavior disadvantages entrepreneurs in business contexts, regardless of their gender. Such a study seems to echo other research identifying bias in the workplace, including the so-called 'sexuality pay gap' that indicates lower average pay for gay men compared to their heterosexual peers, and higher wages for lesbian women versus their straight counterparts. The Harvard Business Review article suggests that because much of professional life is performative anyway, one ought to shift their personal style to combat this bias, which feels like an absurd suggestion. Workers should be able to bring their full self to work, and paid proper money and attention based on performance, not gender, style, or some other aspect of personhood. 

 

More next week.