Design:
- A long read on WeWork, the massive coworking space company. The article touches on many subjects, but one of the more interesting bits is how they leverage data from how people are using their current office spaces to help design the layout of future floors and buildings.
- Some hypothesizing about what a world designed by women would look like, mostly through the lens of architecture.
- Virgil Abloh, known for founding the designer brand Off-White as well as being Kanye West's creative director, is joining Louis Vuitton as the artistic director of their men's collections.
Automatons:
- A good piece from Bloomberg on Fred Moll, the man who helped bring high-precision surgical robots to their current level of prominence and proficiency. Those robots expand the powers and boost the steady-hands of already skilled surgeons, but Moll believes the future of surgery lies in autonomous devices crunching massive data sets and plunging into tissue without a human doing the steering. The procedures that such a system could handle would likely be the more routine, simple ones, but could help make a higher level of care more accessible while freeing up surgeons to spend time on more complex operations.
Building Things:
- Danielle Applestone, the founder of Other Machine Co., now known as Bantam Tools, has created an organization to help get more women into middle and high skill manufacturing jobs.
Labor Pains:
- ProPublica investigates the claims that IBM discriminated against older workers during restructuring layoffs. In a time when a huge percentage of jobs created are tech-related, and youth is so strongly associated with innovation and technological fluency, the stakes are even higher for workers at mid-career or beyond.
Data Logging:
- Regional newspapers act as a chronicle of smaller scale trends and troubles, but the decline of smaller media organizations makes it harder for those stories to get visibility. That has epidemiologists concerned, as local media has historically acted as a canary in the coal mine for fast-moving infectious diseases.
Big Business: