Design:
- A smart, simple design that Uber is rolling out to improve user experience and avoid which-car confusion.
- Beautiful behind the scenes of Nervous System's 3D printing project with New Balance shoes.
(Dis)trusting Technology:
- As toys become connected, data breaches are leading to children's information falling into the wrong hands.
- Your phone usage could be providing credit-worthiness clues to lenders using unconventional and counterintuitive metrics. On one hand, it's questionable because we can't know exactly what we're being graded on, on the other hand it may end up more accurate and fair at assessing risk than the status quo of credit reporting.
- Examining the ethical lines between engagement and addiction. Increasingly, it looks like a lot of the products and services claiming to make our lives better are screwing us out of our free time by manipulating our brains- all for the sake of selling ads.
Roadmapping the Future:
- How to know when your business model needs reinventing.
- If you're a car company worried about the likes of Tesla, Uber or Apple coming to eat your lunch with self driving cars, what do you do? Maybe build robots - the domain knowledge of building fairly large, high complexity devices like cars for a huge range of user needs just might make a great foundation for developinghighly capable robots for the home. Toyota is on it, and Honda has certainly made some big steps in that direction over the years. The big question is whether they will double down on a future where their relevancy in cars is limited, or hope for a convergent path with self-driving technologies that doesn't end in their total disruption.
Branded:
- A ridiculous single-serving soda product from Keurig is floundering. It's a confluence of problems- unlike their coffee makers, it seems like it's not actually more convenient, it's too slow and expensive. The larger problem is that it underscores the negative impressions of their brand as putting profits ahead of environmental responsibility,at a time when they should be doing everything they can to turn things around via more sustainable product development practices.
More next week.