Design:
- Edible food packaging could be instrumental in reducing the waste associated with getting grains, gels and liquids from farm or processing facility to your table. While it started as a neat molecular gastronomy trick it's now getting some real development work to make it a potentially viable commercial solution for mass markets.
- Being a better designer means being a more curious human overall and studying all sorts of things that are not design. Seems obvious enough but worth reiterating.
- A $200 single serving tea machine. The human ritual of making tea goes back to around 300 AD, at least. It's safe to say that collectively we enjoy the habit overall, and that the act of making and sharing tea plays an important role across many cultures and nations, so maybe we would be better off without a "keurig machine for tea."
Humanity Intersecting Technology:
- What happens you spend a lot of time experiencing the world through a robot proxy? Weird things, turns out. A great read on how it feels to filter our human nature through a machine.
- Business Insider says that smartphones and high-fidelity digital maps are helping refugees make their own way and avoid the traps of human traffickers and smugglers.
- Lower automation technology costs could mean some dining out options become more of a "food delivery" experience, less a human one.
Designing Space:
- Giant LEGO-like blocks for adults to build their own life size forts or partitions. It seems a little goofy at first but a modular, flexible function system like that could save mixed-use spaces time, money, and construction/furniture waste over longer term.
Our Weird Future:
- Robots that identify sea stars and then assassinate them (using a poison injecting needle) in order to preserve coral reefs. It might be helping the oceans but it's going to haunt your dreams.
More next week.