Design:
- A patent application and a photo uploaded to Linkedin are among the first indications of what Airbnb's internal design unit Samsara, is up to. The aesthetic of the device definitely has some hallmarks of Lapka: alien styling far from standard consumer electronic practices, contrasting materials and a high level of craft. The device itself is supposed to help travelers by transmitting travel data to them in places where cellular and Wi-Fi service is unreliable. It's hard to tell right now if Airbnb's hardware aspirations will only be available to those on their platform, or if they would venture to make devices for renters/homeowners generally. Platforms like Uber and Lyft have been building hardware for service-provider side users but there's little reason to port those widgets to the general public. It seems inevitable that if Airbnb is serious about pursuing hardware, some of those initiatives will look a lot like "smart home" products, and they'll have to decide whether or not to retail it to the general public.
Building Things:
- Two Boston-area tech companies focused on manufacturing technology emerged from stealth mode this past week: Desktop Metal, which has developed some new metal 3D printing tech to greatly reduce cost and increase speed over existing systems, and Tulip, which is working to make manufacturers more nimble and improve quality through sensors, software, and interactive process documentation. Printing metal is notoriously difficult so if Desktop Metal can live up to the hype of printing metal parts even relatively reliably, it could significantly change how and where metal parts with complex geometries are made. Tulip says their systems are in use by Jabil and the Merck Group - massive, experienced companies producing electronics and pharmaceuticals, respectively. Given that those companies are on the cutting edge of manufacturing optimization on both an equipment and organizational level, their positive experience of Tulip's system is pretty compelling. Desktop Metal and Tulip are representative of where manufacturing on the whole is going: towards higher flexibility of production, greater complexity of goods produced, and mixing hands-off automation with hands-on problem solving to generate value.
Automatons:
- The garment industry is notorious for having awful, exploitative labor practices, with sweatshops flowing to whatever market has the least regulation and the lowest wages. The garment industry has also led to some of the worst workplace disasters in history (e.g. the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 that killed 146 workers, or Rana Plaza collapse in 2013 where 1,129 garment laborers perished). One would expect to see a push for the labor-saving automation found in other sectors, but the amorphous quality of fabric has made cost-effective robotics for apparel construction nearly impossible. The startup Sewbo is hoping to use a new technique where fabric is sprayed with a soluble polymer, stiffening the work in progress to a point where robots can easily and reliably manipulate it for manufacturing. It's an interesting workaround, but so far the apparel industry seems reluctant to deal with the added steps and unknowns of implementing an new process to a very old practice.
Body/Image:
- Amazon announced another hardware product in their Alexa-enabled smart home line. It's called Echo Look and adds a camera capable of full body selfies and that can "help you dress better." That last bit, judging your outfits and making recommendations, seems like an absurd idea to us. Fashion is incredibly personal and contextual (occasion, location, season, how you feel, etc.), so the odds that computation is going to lead to better outcomes there is dubious. This is besides the obvious privacy concerns of having a cloud-connected camera watch you dress/undress, building a trove of data on daily fluctuations that could be analyzed in any manner of ways unbeknownst to you, like speculating about your physical and mental health. This article from Wired lays out some other good points about how such (presumably crowdsourced) judging of outfits via algorithm is likely to fail people that intentionally have an androgynous or non-gender conforming style.
- The clothing business itself is at an interesting juncture, brick-and-mortar retailers are struggling and e-commerce giants like Amazon are making aggressive moves to dominate the sector, filing patents for on-demand clothing fabrication and investing in new ways to gain visibility as a fashion-connected brand through devices like Echo Look. As it stands, Amazon is likely to become the #1 seller of apparel in the U.S. this year, according to analysts. While selling more clothes and capturing extra margin by escaping the need for store rents and staff will be great for their bottom line, Amazon's focus on maximizing speed and minimizing cost might be a bad trend for the environment: 1kg of clothing generates about 23kg of greenhouse gases in attaining that final, fitted form, but we're also burning through clothes at a much faster rate. Across all apparel types, most people are using them only about half as long as we did 15 years ago.
Up In the Air:
- DJI, the world's largest consumer drone maker, is working to geofence large swaths of Syria and Iraq with software no-fly zones. These additional no fly zones first appeared in February but were not reported on until recently. The article speculates that the timing may have coincided with a U.S. led offensive into parts of Iraq around that same time. It says something about the expanded capabilities of consumer technology that a company like DJI finds itself drawn into the midst of international relations and military tactics.
Branded:
More next week.
Quick reminder: we'll be at the Boston Hardware Workshop next week to talk about product development & prototyping
Design:
- The burgeoning (kinda) legal marijuana market in the United States is generating a lot of design, marketing and branding work to de-stigmatize the substance and shake off the "white guy with Bob Marley posters in his dorm" vibe that has dominated the associated goods for decades.
- Despite its blue-collar origins, or maybe because of it, Carharrt clothing is popular across a broad demographic swath, from dairy farmers to UX designers. As a utilitarian, anti-fashion brand, it maintains relevancy regardless of what is happening with popular apparel trends.
- McDonald's unveiled a new set of uniform designs that many have said look a bit like they're out of an authoritarian dystopia. As part of their continued efforts to move away from their image as a cartoon-character laden purveyor of cheap, unhealthy food it makes some sense. Losing the primary colors might also make their workforce feel less like cartoon characters themselves. For us, the most interesting part of this story is the very scale of the design decisions that a large corporation makes: ~850,000 people will be wearing some variant of these new uniforms. For comparison, the entire U.S. Army has about 540,000 people. We don't know yet whether or not the cyborg gray color palette is preparing customers for a more automated future of fast food.
Building Things:
- An interesting new method for printing medium-to-large envelope parts: injecting thermosetting resins and rubbers into a vat of goo, which acts as a continuous support structure. Like many other additive manufacturing methods, it has fairly poor surface finish, so the notion of it being used for something like office furniture (Steelcase is the corporate sponsor of the research) seems unlikely and the geometric inconsistency makes it problematic for jigs or fixtures. That said, it's early stage research and shows real promise in terms of speed over other methods.
Virtually There:
- There's a case in Wisconsin right now that claims 1st Amendment Rights protection for Augmented Reality games after Milwaukee County introduced a permit requirement for any games that put AR locations within the county's park system. The permit scope is pretty extensive: providing on-site medical and security staff, a garbage clean up plan and liability insurance among other things. It's a complex area for public/private interests to be balanced with regulation: on one hand free-assembly is critical for free speech and democratic society, on the other, private companies painting public lands with digital billboards that lure masses of people with "rare" digital goods brings undue and unpredictable burdens for municipalities and their taxpayers. As one of the first AR cases, the outcome could have a huge impact on the nascent industry in establishing early legal precedents.
- The technologies behind accurately reconstructing an individual's voice are becoming highly capable and low cost. While great from an assistive tech perspective, it presents some huge security concerns. Imagine a loved one calls your phone saying they're stranded, asking you to wire them money only to find out later it was simple voice bot running a highly effective voice-based phishing scam. Add voice to the list of things that may appear authentic but can't be automatically trusted.
Upgrading Ourselves:
Material Culture:
- "We have too many things, too many distractions, too many items offered to us..." Those were the words of Reverend Giuseppe Masseroni memorializing Emma Moreno, the world's oldest woman, who lived 117 years. The New York Times looks at the objects in her life.
More next week.
Design:
- "Google has a new drawing tool that's extremely cool and also a little bit depressing."
- It won't be long until complex, autonomous or semi-autonomous machines become a regular sight in our daily lives, whether it's in our offices or on our streets and sidewalks. As we step into a system where robots are living out in the world and not just on factory floors, new design and engineering concerns also arise, like making signage legible to humans and machines. In the future we may have something like autonomous-friendly building codes layered on top of those designed to serve human needs, with things like elevators or tangible interfaces having an invisible aspect for machine access.
- Perhaps a conceptual art project, possibly a goods-by-subscription startup, or maybe a parody of designer aesthetics and Silicon Vallery startups, Lot 2046 has been making some ripples on social media. The project is by one of Vadik Marmeladov of Lapka fame, the tiny design firm that was acquired by Airbnb in 2015, Vadik left in 2016).
Branded:
Building Things:
- Fastenal, the manufacturer, distributor and reseller of construction/industrial supplies has seen an increase in sales, in part from their vending machineswhere you can pick up a can of WD-40, a respirator, welding supplies or whatever other relevant manufacturing errata you might need. The machines have been around for awhile, but their usage has grown significantly (Fastenal now has over 64,000 vending machines). It's the sort of dull but incredibly valuable innovation that escapes many startups working in IoT or technology more broadly.
- There are probably more online enabled, direct-to-consumer mattress companies than anyone needs, but the story of Purple is more interesting than most. They've bootstrapped their company rather than taking VC dollars and seem to have some genuinely novel intellectual property that emerged from their previous venture developing wheelchair seating to reduce risk of pressure sores. The article reads more like a PR release for the company than a real dig into their operations, but well worth a read for anyone looking at non-VC paths to growth.
- There's about $17 MM worth of titanium on a 787 according to Boeing. They've been working with Norsk Titanium to print some of these titanium parts to near net shape and cut costs.
Virtually There:
Machines for Moving:
More next week.
