Insights 5.22

Design:

• We wrote a couple of things: why humans make things, the ways mass production has failed human needs, and how we might do things differently in the future, and the tensions that can emerge in developing the user experience aspects of smart home devices that are monetized through data collection and analysis.
• Someone trained a neural network to make up colors and name them, based on training data from Sherwin-Williams. There's not really much of a story here technology wise, but the resulting bland, beige-adjacent colors with derpy names are pretty comical, at least if you're into non sequitur. We can't wait to suggest "Bank Butt" as a color option for a re-branding effort. From a data training perspective it's definitely a flawed proposition - we humans largely derive color names from words we've already connected with various natural phenomena. If the algorithms had used the available RGB data more intelligently (e.g. if G value greater than X, scrape first word of color name from plant database), the names might actually work quite well. 
• Emoji watch: though emoji don't have Western origins, much of the voting power in the Unicode Consortium (which is responsible for emoji standards) is held by U.S. centric tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google. This has led to Westernized interpretations of objects or food that read more as parody than cartoony reportage to those in the know. With so many products and services now reaching a truly global audience at scale, there's increasing need for deep cultural expertise and interpreters to make sure messages don't get mangled or stereotypes reproduced.  

Virtually There: 

• Augmented Reality from the big tech companies has roots in film and animation experiments from the early 1900s. 

Big Business: 

• Etsy is struggling to balance their original mission and status as a B-Corp with demands from shareholders to increase profitability. The transition from startup to publicly traded company can be rough for any team, but ones that are especially entwined with a community built on the founders promises find themselves with even more difficult choices. The same strategies that seem like an obvious path to expanding their market can alienate early, core users. How Etsy navigates this period in its history and the outcome will likely be business school case studies in years to come, and impact how companies handle B-Corp status in the future. 
• A good profile of how electronics accessories maker Anker built a strong brand and business in a highly commoditized market segment.  

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• Another approach to occupational exoskeletons is being piloted by Lowe's: using carbon fiber rods as spring-assist for lifting heavy loads. E-commerce has put increasing demands on warehouses and retailers to do things faster and at ever lower costs. Whether it's Kiva robots moving shelves to human workers or mechanically souped-up shelf-stockers, retail and warehouse environments have emerged as significant spaces for experiments in the future of human/machine collaboration and competition. 

Roadmapping the Future: 

• A new book that seeks to quantify and prioritize efforts to slow climate change. It's important to note that some of the highest-impact solutions are social/cultural shifts, not technological ones: reducing animal protein consumption, educating girls, increasing access to family planning, and reducing food waste. 
• Arctic ice is melting near the Svalbard Seed Vault, which led to widespread reports of flooding within the vault and compromise of its natural archives. Those claims were inaccurate, the vault is holding just fine. 

 

More next week. 

Insights 5.15

Design:

• A video on the designers that created the distinct visual style of southern hip hop album artwork in the 1990s. The text effects, photoshop flames, and composited cars all came together in a way unlike anything before it or since. In a way, it was an aesthetic celebration of suddenly available power: for rappers getting rich quickly: showing off assets of an upper crust lifestyle, for designers: having powerful graphic design tools that allowed an individual or small team to put together something quite complex. 
• Once upon a time, the on-screen logos for TV networks were physical objects or entire mechanisms. In some ways we have come full circle, with digital brands utilizing physical devices as "immersive experiences" that connect users IRL. Brands are a flat circle. 
• That possibly concept art/possibly marketing stunt all-black clothing and accessory subscription project that we covered a few weeks ago is apparently real. 

Building Things: 

• The latest from LEGO on their quest to replace the petroleum-sourced ABS plastic they use for their products with a bioplastic. They seem to have ruled out polylactic acid (PLA), a common material for consumer 3D printers due to its propensity to "creep" and shift form over time. LEGO uses 70,000 metric tons of ABS every year, and if they can make bioplastics a reality for mass production, it could have a massive impact on consumer plastic goods in general. As people who design products for the advantages and constraints of plastics everyday, we're genuinely, nerdily, excited about bioplastics becoming that much closer to a mass-production reality. 
• There must be something in the air- more and more people are discussing how 3D printing is on a clear trajectory towards living up to the term additive manufacturing: making end-use components and products as an alternative to traditional methods like injection molding, stamping, and so on. Christopher Mims in The Wall Street Journal stress tests some 3D printed shoe soles and a metal hinge from Desktop Metal, and Jon Bruner interviews Max Lobvosky of Formlabs on how 3D printing will expand to include more and more industries. While the story of 3D printing supplanting other mass production methods has been a hyped story for awhile, advances in speed, material science, and methods are starting to deliver on some of that promise, at least for goods that require some degree of customization.

Energy: 

• Some good news: U.S. households are using less electricity. The highly-efficient LED lighting displacing incandescent and fluorescent bulbs is claimed as the cause. 

Branded: 

• A really good read from one of the founders of K-HOLE, the group of self-described cultural strategists on how big corporations sought their art-world-bred cultural acuity but typically (unsurprisingly) de-fanged their proposals, tossing away the meat of their concepts in favor of surface treatments and mere nods in the direction of something subversive. Anyone who has ever worked in such contexts will find things in common to cringe about; corporations claim to seek to understand human needs, desires, and cultural trends but actually accepting those influences or even presenting those ideas often feels like an oil-meets-water scenario. 

Data Logging: 

• Apple has acquired the sleep tracking hardware company Beddit, likely in a bid to appease people that have a deep desire for round-the-clock quantified self analytics (the Apple Watch has had some criticism from quantified self die-hards as its battery life precluded round-the-clock use). Adding sleep tracking to the buffet of data available will add value for some, but we'd bet that Apple has more in mind for this asset. 

 

More next week. 

Insights 5.08

Design:

• An excellent examination of how we can visualize data and phenomena with qualitative displays and interfaces rather than the default quantitative ones that are typical in software and hardware. Often qualitative data can be just as actionable as quantitative prompts, with the added benefit of reducing visual and cognitive noise- e.g. the number of steps I've taken is not much more meaningful than whether I've been more or less active than usual. Also noteworthy: many of these displays require no screens or electronics at all.

Building Things: 

• Powder Injection Molding (PIM) is a new process that came out of a joint development partnership between BASF and injection molding machine maker Arburg. The technology produces metallic parts with all of the low-cost geometric complexity of injection molding but with surface finishes and durability of closer to machined metal components. Apple has popularized aluminum alloys in consumer electronics and the companies behind this manufacturing process are hoping that PIM could see wide adoption as an alternative to machining, though given Apples "truth in materials" approach, it seems unlikely they would use the process themselves. 
• Apple says they're going to spend around $ 1 billion on advanced manufacturing initiatives in the U.S., though the details on what that will look like are currently quite slim. 

Virtually There: 

• Oculus Rift, now under Facebook's ownership, has pulled the plug on their VR movie/video division. VR tech is pretty solid (if expensive) at this point, but creating content that is unique to the format and compelling enough to move the needle for producers is an immense challenge that hasn't been met so far. There are also some cultural and behavior aspects to passive media like movies that VR gets in the way of: social viewing, multi-tasking, live-tweeting, and so on. In 2017, it's awfully rare that we are ready to sit alone, away from our smartphones and friends and give moving images (immersive or not) our full attention. 

Automatons: 

• Agricultural work has been on the forefront of deploying new technologies for centuries. In 2017 that pattern still holds, with numerous startups working on putting robots into pastures and furrowed fields. GPS guided combines for harvesting grains have been in use for awhile but automating the collection of tender crops like fruit has been a significant challenge only solved through creative approaches, like this apple-sucking robot (the company making the device was spun out of a lab funded by the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission, which is maybe the specific interest group we've ever heard of). The availability of seasonal labor that orchards rely on has been in decline for some time, but concerns about changes in immigration policy are accelerating interest in robotic harvesters. Both nature and technology bend towards the needs and realities of the other - in this case the robots are designed to be delicate with the fruit, but the trees are spaced and tended in certain ways to make robotic (or human) harvesting easier. The tools we make respond to the world as we find it, but also reshape it. 
• Uber seems like a natural winner from the development of reliable self-driving cars, but Christopher Mims at The Wall Street Journal lays out the case against it - namely that the real hurdles of running a self-driving empire will come from building and maintaining those vehicles, not from routing them. Which makes Tesla, along with traditional car makers like Ford and GM, real contenders for killing off the app-first ride-share companies over the long term. 

Roadmapping the Future: 

• This collaboration between Google, Accenture, and a pest control company gives a glimpse of the future of work, where front-line workers are equipped with computational or augmented reality superpowers. The project uses computer vision and machine learning to enable pest-control technicians to snap a photo of a suspicious insect and have it identified via an app. 
• From cyberpunk to postapocalyptic wastelands, often our visions of the future are incredibly bleak. That's not without good reason: the existential challenges we face are real and feel more insurmountable by the day. We've been hearing doom-and-gloom stories about the future for a long time, but it seems to have little impact on how we operate in order to avoid those grim outcomes. Some technologists, artists, and writers are trying to create and advocate for a vision of the future called solarpunk, centered on sustainability, community development, and a more humane style of technology and trade. While it seems impossible to will such change into existence, creating the language and rough templates to suggest such a world is important- just look at how pattern matching, trend spotting (and following) works within the world of tech investments. Whether it's social networks, the Internet of Things, or AI, the world we work at creating is reflective of the ideas being surfaced and repeated in a given era. As powerful as technology is, the manner in which it moves is driven at a deeper level by cultural values and political rationale. The future is not yet decided, and if we can avoid the barren wasteland of dystopian visions through talking up and disseminating ideas for more optimistic ones, it's worth a shot. 

More next week.