Design:
- The trend of designing for maximum guilt-tripping in user experiences. While it might help on sales conversion, it's a shitty experience for most users and an example of design deployed in unethical way.
- Poorly designed processes for quantifying performance in healthcare lead to more burnout for medical professionals: "Another 2013 study found that emergency room doctors clicked a mouse 4,000 times during a 10-hour shift." It's a cautionary note for the quantification trend across other industries, don't let the score keeping get in the way of providing the actual value.
- Face cones to protect you from blizzard effects were once a thing, but it didn't stick.
Feeding the Future:
- How McDonald's develops, tests, and deploys menus.
- Maybe it's because one of our founders grew up in big farm country, but we're skeptical of how relevant or practical urban farming is as an alternative to Big Ag. As a supplement or in reducing the harm that comes with living in a food desert neighborhood city however, it demonstrates a certain amount of promise. More promising is that this latest apartment appropriate sized plant producing device out of MIT is open-source, which goes a long way to making it work for the communities that need it most.
- As many as 45,000 farmers picked up a drone or two over the holidays.
Machines for Moving:
- A look at the logistics logic behind Dole (yep, the fruit folks) owning the container ships they use to get fresh fruit from one continent to another.
Our Weird Future:
More next week.