Design insights.
Design:
- Anyone who does day in, day out design work can tell you how difficult and complex it is to maintain quality and consistency across an organization. This amazingly specific set of rules for animating the TV show King of the Hill is a pretty good look at the efforts required to preserve your original vision over time.
(Dis)trusting Technology:
- The ethics of micropayments and intentionally sub-optimal user experiences. When a paywall is fractured into a thousand tiny $ hurdles, the system begins to look more like a casino than a product.
Feeding the Future:
- Drone maker DJI, mostly known for their high-end consumer products is getting into the agricultural drone market with a machine capable of spraying crops with pesticides or herbicides.
Designing Space:
- Ikea has sponsored an innovation lab of sorts in order to predict and plan for how domestic space will look and function in the future.
- The Restart Project offers a sort of counterpoint to the Ikea innovation lab, looking at a scrappier future (and present) where we work to fix and conserve products to reduce consumption, rather than somehow shopping ourselves to a better future.
Building Things:
- For your sobering post-black Friday consideration: the incredible speed and scale of manufacturing efforts in China to feed U.S. fads.
- A great behind the scenes look at the rise and struggles of the repair-advocacy and equipment company iFixit.
Branded:
- The burden of brand: a Red Wing Pottery store in Minnesota is shutting down, citing bad blood and outright rage directed towards the company that goes back to decades old labor disputes. Despite having different ownership, the animosity has stuck firmly in place.
- When it comes to places synonymous with innovation Boston is behind places like Silicon Valley despite being where the technology foundations that underpin the likes of Apple, Instagram and Google come from. Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe makes a case for Bostonians to rebrand the city as the R &D lab for the world.
Our Weird Future:
- Clothing for your domestic robot. Someday teenagers will mock Roombas for their out of date fashion choices.
More next week.