Design:
- A look at the difference between photo-realism and realism in painting, and how we perceive shape, form, color and space in general. It's worth noting that fine art and design education are pretty divergent here, with fine art teaching multiple modes of depicting visual space that are based on inference, and design education focused on making things as clear and communicative as possible. Skeuomorphism in digital design might rely on tricking the eye (creating the illusion of 3D space) in a way similar to painting, but it's purpose is still clear communication more than reveling in the weirdness of human perception. Perhaps the UI of AR/VR tech will depart from that clear-cut tradition to engage with a more painterly way of presenting information and interactivity.
- Some big brands rolled out new design approaches this past week, with Twitter and Bloomberg Business Week both rebooting their looks. We were personally big fans of the prior incarnation of Bloomberg Business Week's bold choices in design, graphics and presentation, particularly their online content which blended animation, illustration and typography in a way that went beyond visual interest and really added depth and flavor to the articles themselves. But we can understand that from a viewpoint of seeking customers from the buttoned-up world of finance and Fortune 500s they very well might be making the right choice. The reactions to Twitter's redesign were predictably intense. Any mass social platform that redesigns goes through a period of hand-wringing, disgruntled users, and unsolicited suggestions but much of the reasoning behind it is sound: the feather quill to represent writing didn't translate well for a global user base, pushing platform content to the fore vs. the twitter brand itself, and so on.
Automatons:
- Last year the Chinese appliance company Midea acquired a majority stake in Kuka, the industrial robotics company. We wrote a tiny blurb about that event last summer theorizing that it was a bet on automation to deal with rapidly rising wages in China but it seems that's only part of Midea's plan. They're working on robots *as* appliances - domestic bots to deliver on the usual appliance marketing promises: making your life easier, better, saving you time and money, and so on. We've worked with a number of robotics companies and we think Midea's approach here is incredibly savvy. For one thing, it's easier for a company with deep brand trust to get a person to make the leap to a robot, but mostly developing both appliances and robots means they can create strong interoperability across the hardware that makes up the modern home - e.g. it's much easier for a robot to know how to deal with your dishwasher if it knows all the details of the dishwasher, and how to talk to it machine-to-machine.
Big Business:
- Looking at the Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods move through a few stories: the dynamics of retail/e-commerce titans Walmart and Amazon battling it out through the lens of dress shirts (with lessons on returns to scale, fast fashion, and the growth of winner-take-most firms), BuzzFeed compares prices at Whole Foods to Amazon (and unsurprisingly, finds Amazon sells some of the same goods for 25-40% less, but some goods have a gap of only a few percent). It's not at all clear what Amazon's acquisition is about from a strategic perspective, but those hoping for cheaper Whole Foods goods from their local store may be left disappointed.
Virtually There:
Engineering Communities:
- MIT is shutting down the (in)famous Senior House - a community known for partying hard, but also for being creative, artistic, and diverse in terms of race, class, and sexuality. Alums are not happy about the decision, which MIT says was done in an attempt to address the much lower 4 year graduation rate of Senior House residents vs the university as a whole. In a high-pressure, high-performance place like MIT, having the support of peers that embrace you as you are seems incredibly important. Given that the institution has also struggled to address their suicide rate in the past, scrapping a place that many MIT grads revere as a sanctuary seems incredibly shortsighted. The truth is that innovation often emerges from these 'messy' spaces that challenge the status quo not just from a technological perspective but also from a social one. When we over-police, over-regulate, and redistrict the weird spaces out of existence everyone loses, even the normies.
More next week.
Pardon the delay - last week we were attending The Digital Factoryand presenting at Formlabs User Conference. There's a ton of significant, interesting developments and concepts from those two days that we'll be summarizing and posting soon.
Design:
- Mary Meeker's famous annual report on internet trends is out, and there are some interesting developments related to design on slides 61 and 71, showing how apparel manufacturers Allbirds and Stitch Fix are using a combination of customer feedback, reviews, engagement and sales data to tune or construct new products. As a semi-invisible crowd-sourcing methodology it's pretty interesting, but ultimately overall trends start somewhere, and this data can only be collected as a reaction to the prompt of existing products. That said, those kinds of nimble insights into ever-changing consumer behavior could be a tool for dealing with overproduction and wasted goods.
- A convincing argument that unlocking the potential of 3D printing has a lot to do with design - both in terms of the limited access to design and how we need to change our conceptual models for developing the form and function of a product if we are to make the most of additive manufacturing.
- Ian Bogost at The Atlantic on the self-indulgence of marketing-led design that often results in inferior quality goods selling at a steep markup: "Mahabis is one of many commodity manufacturers that present their ordinary wares as if they were complex, high-tech goods." This is one of the now fairly long-running crises of the so-called design community - yes, design is important but not every artifact is critical, and very often we serve people best by building good, simple, low cost things and getting out of the way rather than trying to conjure some bizarre emotional relationship between humans and the things they use to protect their feet.
Building Things:
Automatons:
More next week.
Design:
Body/Image:
- After normcore, there is gorpcore. The "defiantly ugly" trend of wearing similarly basic clothing, but pulled from outdoors retailers like REI and Patagonia. The article cites a sentiment similar to the motivations of normcore: an escape from the myriad complexity of choice, a distancing from designer, and a general comfort derived from both the garments themselves and the soft embrace of conformity. As more of our social activity and outward facing image is constructed, maintained and remixed in digital space, maybe it's just not worth the cognitive and financial costs to fine-tune an IRL aesthetic as well. Maybe it's simply a U.S. flavored version of Airspace for fashion - the minimalist, modernist style that has pervaded the globe as a sort of designer-object Soylent, filling a need but without much life or pleasure in the process. On the other end of the spectrum are the brands working to manufacture desire through manufacturing scarcity itself, with Lululemon creating a retail space for goods that are not available online, and Supreme articles that run in limited editions, gobbled up by bots. In the face of brands trying so hard to get you to care enough collect their wares at a premium, buying some fleece off the rack and getting on with your life seems like a pretty sound idea.
- A really good piece on wearable technology from a more complete, cultural perspective. As the article says, what is really new about "wearables" is their digital capacity for sensing, analysis and signaling, not the overall category itself - the how and where of boundaries between technology/artifact and body/identity has been with us from our earliest human history. We think part of why the 21st century idea of wearable technology has performed poorly is that it has been too much about fragmenting smartphone-style tech to limbs, and less about understanding the deeply personal aspects of bodily identity and how technology may connect to that.
Big Business:
- IKEA is the latest corporate giant to create a start up program. Hopefully they have studied the similarly ambitious but now-dissolved programs of Coca-Cola, Target, Turner, & others. With the grim odds of startups scaling at all, and the fact that those that do have often undergone serious pivots in the problems they are trying to solve for, means that there's poor alignment in the incentives for tiny teams and multi-national corporations. In general, we have found that large companies do best by startups when they play the role of strategic investor, rather than incubator/accelerator. As an investor-only, startups have the latitude to pursue their goals on whatever meandering path in necessary for success, and large companies get the chance to snatch up potentially disruptive competitors at preferential prices.
Machines for Moving:
Up in the Air:
- Snap Inc. has acquired a small drone startup, awhile after previous talks with now-defunct dronemaker, Lily Robotics fell through. We can't wait for the "how millennials are ruining drones" pieces that will surely follow any Snap-related drone product (assuming there ever is one).
More next week.
