Design:
- How food trucks are structured.
- If you can ignore the bougie-materialistic pretension from the author in this piece on the Apple Watch with Jony Ive, there's a few interesting details that make it worth the read, like the fact that Apple used outside consultants during that product's development. The author wrongly states that this was "one of the first and only times" the company did so (Apple famously worked with frog founder Hartmut Esslinger, as well as IDEO). While it's true that Apple uses external design consultants far less than their hardware peers, the organization has a history of bringing in outside perspectives when digging into a brand new product line.
Energy:
Roadmapping the Future:
- Ingrid Burrington with an examination of the various mappings of the internet. From Google's nearly all-seeing photos of streets, to Facebook's ability to capture complex webs of relationships with the likes and status updates of its human nodes, it is almost impossible to escape being on the radar. Burrington calls for something other than quiet acquiescence to the maps imposed on whole civilizations by technology companies optimizing for their own profit. Burrington concludes the piece with a saboteur's call to arms: to escape the snares of malignant mapping will require outright monkeywrenching, inserting a mess of glitches and false patches of information in an attempt to re-draw the maps and create a new kind of terra incognita.
Up in the Air:
- A new type of spacecraft, designed to capture and collect space debris is in the process of being deployed for initial testing.
- Commercial drones grow more and more capable: a startup called Volans-i is building UAVs that can carry 20 lbs. up to 500 miles.
Machines for Moving:
Material Culture:
- For tradespeople, removing wedding bands at the beginning the day (or never wearing them at all) has long been the norm due to risk of catastrophic wounds when that tiny piece of metal comes into contact with machine tools or high voltage power. The increased popularity of powerlifting, rock climbing, and training regimens like CrossFit have brought similar concerns to the fore for white collar workers with athletically ambitious leisure pursuits. Kevin Purdy at the product review site Wirecutter writes a bit about the trend of silicone rings as a solution, and the relatively nascent aesthetic standards and considerations. The post is a reminder that as much technology has changed how we live, in the materials that surround us day-to-day, we remain beholden to styles and manufacturing techniques that are nearly ancient, rather than hurtling towards the kind of hectic amalgamation of gear imagined in cyberpunk novels of decades past.