sign:
- Our friend Marco Cross is kicking off a complex design & fabrication project: building a moped from scratch. It's definitely worth following along with, in large part to how transparently he is documenting the process, starting with initial conception and defining project parameters. It's exactly the kind of stuff that makes up the majority of a good product design/development cycle but is largely invisible to outside observers browsing portfolios or case studies.
- Wired profiles the color controversy of Vantablack and artist Anish Kapoor. It's not a totally new story but Wired fleshes it out with greater background and detail than we've seen elsewhere, as well as covering some other historical examples of intellectual property protected colors.
- A really great, detailed read on how the sound design of the recent Wonder Woman movie was developed.
Building Things:
- We wrote up some thoughts on The Digital Factory event from a few weeks ago, along with some commentary on other trends in how physical products get marketed and sold via platforms like Kickstarter. The overarching narrative here is that a lot of converging technologies and models are leading to a different way of doing business for tangible goods.
Upgrading Ourselves:
- Exoskeletons, being an extension of the body, function best when they are tuned to the individual user. Researchers are working on methods for quickly 'exo-tailoring' the systems so they function as intended and minimize the human energy required.
- A convincing argument from Christopher Mims at The Wall Street Journal that future smartphones will cease to be phones and start to be a small network of sensors and interfaces across the body.
Engineering Communities:
- Facebook has long claimed a mission to connect the world, but they've had a bumpy time in the past year or so dealing with rampant fake news on their platform and concerns around filter bubbles that increase division rather than bringing people together. The latest controversy the company has found themselves tangled up in is around the issue of LGBTQ visibility- that is, Pride related icons on their platform literally don't show up for everyone, in what critics are suggesting is a form of digital gerrymandering. We'd say it's more of a non-consensual editorializing, that restricts an individual's expression in ways they may not even be aware of.