Insights 2.27

Design:

• Whether it's pre-cut fruit or fonts deemed aesthetically offensive there is a human tendency to dismiss a thing as worthless, self-indulgent, or frivolous without really considering the range of needs across the spectrum of humanity. The latest example in this good-but-misunderstood category to come to our attention is that the oft-derided typeface Comic Sans is incredibly useful for people with dyslexia. Another interesting one came from playing around with Snap Spectacles out in the world over the past couple of months. One day we met a man with a traumatic brain injury that has left him with poor short term memory, and he particularly struggles with matching names to faces unless he has repeat exposure. He was interested in using Spectacles to record introductions to new people and replay them; making these moments into permanent memories. While we may have a particular notion in mind of who and how will use the things we design and engineer, humans are great at adapting tools to address their own needs and will continually surprise us. It's also a reminder to strive for the most open-ended version of something, to enable people to make the choice best for them rather than taking the "father knows best" attitude of limiting options and preserving some faulty concept of product purity. If Snap made you upload content from their camera glasses directly Snapchat and share socially, it couldn't function as memory assistive tech and if a blogging platform won't let you choose your own font, your writing could be difficult for readers with dyslexia to access. 

Making Technology Work for Us: 

• Ian Bogost at the Atlantic has an excellent piece on how the use of sensors, automation and algorithms is upending previous configurations of how technology worked for people. There was once a pairing of functionality and affordance that would output some straightforward benefit. Now, toilets can flush themselves; saving labor but wasting water. Social platforms that thrive by selling ads develop for provocation first, pitting pockets of society against one another to boost engagement but reducing chances for cultural cohesion. Bogost argues that technology now has its own emergent, opaque agenda that is more likely to serve corporations and tech expansion than people. In the 21st century it's sometimes impossible to tell if we are using technology, getting used by it, or both. Looking at the past may help us design better for the future by working in a similar transparency of interaction and outcome (turn crank, paper is output at some easily understood ratio). 

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• A DIY kit for adding north-facing sensing to your body via an almost-implanted electronic widget (it can be mounted on top of sub-dermal piercings) being covered by Bloomberg Businessweek is probably the most cyberpunk story you'll see this week. 

Up in the Air: 

• A drone crashed through a window, entering an apartment in Manhattan on Saturday.

Roadmapping the Future: 

• Christian leaders and church organizations are unsure how to deal with their religion being sampled for a digital generation. Religious leaders quoted in the article speak of encountering new mutations of scripture reflective of a digitized and partially secularized congregation: millennials that are more likely to convert sacred texts into memes and share them on Facebook than attend morning mass. In some ways this mimics earlier anxieties regarding parishioners, where the possibility of reading texts for themselves rather than relying on interpretations from higher ups like priests and deacons was viewed as dangerous. Given the deep influence on public life and policy Christian churches enjoyed in the past, adjusting to a wold where mass culture and technology moves religious practice must feel even more unsettling. The long march of information towards total availability to all continues. Traditional arbiters of truth will have to find new ways of being useful and relevant, giving up gatekeeping in favor of curating, counseling or counteracting the whirlwinds of atomized data washing over laypeople.

More next week. 

Insights 2.20

Design:

• Netflix put out a new documentary series on design. The New Yorker has a piece that points out their framing of the design field is somehow simultaneously too broad (folding in architecture and photography among other things) and too narrow (no real coverage of say, interaction or service design) and errs on the side of boosterism rather than looking at the design industry critically. To be fair, it's difficult to be comprehensive in a handful of episodes but it is an odd melange to start with and after watching the series it's curious that the two industrial design episodes (covering shoes in one, cars in the other) fail to present any negative consequences (like sweat shops or climate change) of mass design and consumption. It's well worth watching, but we'd love to see more honest, deep conversations about design make it to the screen. It's possible celebrate the pleasures of design and its positive potential while also pushing for higher standards and more complete stories that account for externalities. 
• The Museum of Modern Art in New York has become a big supporter of well-designed products that began their lives on kickstarter, helping young companies continue sales through an unconventional retail channel: the museum store. 

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• Elon Musk says humans will need to become cyborgs to maintain relevance and avoid drowning in the rising sea of automation and AI. While the further integration of hardware and our bodies and brains is virtually guaranteed (see: pacemakers, IUDs, brain implants to reduce Parkinson's symptoms, etc.) the idea that embedded upgrades will become necessities for economic survival is fraught with ethical and legal issues. We already live in a world where the rules around exactly how we can use, hack, repair or alter technology are complicated, restricting our access to our everyday devices. If you combine intellectual property frameworks like those intersecting our basic human rights for bodily autonomy, along with the fact that workers being displaced by technology and struggling to find work will also struggle to find the means to afford such procedures, you have all the makings of a true moral quagmire. For the future to do more than echo injustices of the past dressed up in a shiny veneer of new technology, areas of development like this will require incredibly careful steps. Assuming there is a 'proper' way to engage with concepts like cyborg-laborers, there will still be deep impacts on culture and society, with real potential to permanently segment populations in ways we've never seen before. 

Engineering Communities: 

• Two approaches to dealing with housing shortages and providing shelters for the homeless in the Bay Area: one via direct action activism, and one based on constructing 160 square foot "micro unit" apartments that would rent for around $ 1,000/month. We're all for diversity of tactics when it comes to tackling big, complex problems, but transitioning from homelessness to paying rent of a grand a month seems like it won't do much to help out the most vulnerable residents of our cities. It's a bridge too far, and desperately needs more transitional design practices to close that gap. While the DIY shelters are arguably flimsy, ugly and unlicensed, they offer an immediate solution to keeping people dry and shielded from the winds. 
• After a period of time when "platform" companies attempted to remain agnostic and sidestep taking blame for the bad behavior of users, a few are now making an effort to be more accountable and take action. Backchannel has the story of NextDoor (a community message board/neighborhood watch for the internet generation) and their struggles with exacerbating racial profiling in communities. After pressure from the press and existing community groups, NextDoor made changes in UI/UX that have reduced complaints of profiling. Similarly, twitter seems to finally be getting serious about addressing the twin-headed beast of harassment and hate-speech on their platform. They recently rolled out a change that temporarily reduces the reach of users with abusive behaviors and constricts their ability to assemble ad-hoc mobs that harass specific targets. 

Branded: 

• Some background on the Keep Austin Weird slogan, how it's been adopted by other weird (or aspirationally weird) cities and the many attempts by others to commercialize it and cash in. 

More next week. 

Insights 2.13

Design:

• How W.E.B. Du Bois used data visualization to tell the story of black lives in America for the World's Fair in 1900. The hand-drawn and painted diagrams feel very contemporary in their ability to bring immediate visual clarity to complex information.
• The augmented reality startup Magic Leap has raised $ 1.39B of investment over the last 6 years, but limited demonstrations of the technology has led to questions of whether that money has produced real product value or if they are on the road to vaporware. This week a photo of a supposedly working prototype was leaked. It's... really big and fairly ugly, and quite far from a reasonable-looking piece of wearable tech. The CEO disputes the claim that the device depicted is a prototype, describing it instead as a test rig. We will have to wait and see if they can make good on their massive valuation. 

Automatons: 

• Hoteliers have been using robots for room service, and they'd like more, according to The Economist. Like restaurants, hotels have tight margins, lengthy service hours, low wages and are often dependent on undocumented workers and immigrants generally. With an uncertain future for immigration in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, there could be a shrinking supply of labor for hotels and restaurants in those countries, triggering a commensurate investment in automation for those industries. 

Feeding the Future: 

• Regular readers of this newsletter know that we are generally skeptical of "smart" products related to cooking, finding that they somehow manage to complicate simple tasks while preventing development of new skills and the pleasure of improvisation. Well, there's finally some cooking tech that looks genuinely innovative and useful from our perspective: a new type of oven using RF (radio frequency) to quickly cook multiple foods at different intensities of heat simultaneously. This apparently allows for some bizarrely precise operations, like their demo of cooking a fish within a block of ice. This could mean that making nutritionally complete meals from fresh ingredients becomes much more practical for busy people and families. And while you can imagine these devices being highly prescriptive ("run this program for your steak cooked to Anthony Bourdain's preferred level of doneness") it doesn't preclude experimentation which is a hallmark of technologies that augment human potential instead of making us more like automatons. That's the kind of futuristic thinking we can get behind.

Solutions from Down the Supply Chain: 

• Chance the Rapper became the first to win a Grammy for a streaming-only album, a notable milestone for independent artists and producers everywhere. While widespread internet adoption was supposed to unlock a direct-to-audience model where craft producers or creative visionaries could deliver their works without editorial meddling and aggressive fees taken out, that model is still more theoretical than practical. While this award is a big, visible crack in the foundation in the old way of doing business, the window of opportunity for independent creators to find an audience online (and success on their own terms) may be closing if net neutrality goes away. 

More next week.