Insights 8.28

Design:

• Music production programs may contain the most intensely (and anachronistically) skeuomorphic interface designs of any professional software class. While the "honesty" of flat design has swept across many domains, music software remains a stubborn holdout that feels baroque in its artificial depth and rich gradients. While the current UI trend is minimal, flat, and loaded with white space, it seems wrong to dismiss these highly textured interfaces as bad just because they are swimming against the aesthetic currents of the moment. If it adds to confusion, then sure, those are bad interfaces - but in many cases the homogeneity of flat designs can be equally confounding. Rather than subscribing to any one set of visual conventions, designers should focus on making products and services work well for their users.

Machines for Moving: 

• Germany's Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure put out an ethics report on what actions autonomous vehicles should be able to take. Among the forbidden: in the case of an unavoidable accident, the decision-making software can't take into account age, gender, race or class of the potential victims. Also interesting is their position that liability concerns emerging from autonomous vehicle operation should put accountability on the product maker, which is basically in line with product liability standards for non-autonomous vehicles. 

Virtually There: 

• There's a new augmented reality app that will show you your dead loved ones at their gravesite. While it might feel a bit jarring as a sort of posthumous Pokémon Go, humans have always used their latest and greatest technologies to pay tribute to, and remember the dead. Social media platforms have struggled with the continued representation of the dead, whose portraits and vacation photos remain networked even after their corporeal body has been interred or turned to ash. Maybe it seems a bit crass to pay a monthly service fee to see the AR deceased hover above their own grave, but an internet that eventually forgets and fades the departed is in some ways more true to life: no matter how solid the monument or how significant the legacy, every life lost eventually fades to make room for the new ones. 
• Motion sickness is a big problem for widespread virtual reality adoption and content creators: to ensure users don't get ill, game designers have to dial down the most powerful effects. To avoid the predicament of thrilling many while sickening some, researchers are working on a "nausea dial" that would allow people to tune the VR experience to fit their particular physiological reaction. Let's hope they don't connect this dial to the internet.. 

Communication: 

• How Instagram's purposeful damming up of content flow ("link in bio") arguably makes for a better experience. 
• Nicole Nguyen at Buzzfeed looks at big U.S. tech companies attempting to bring high speed internet to every human on earth. It's not a new story, but she explains the subject exceptionally well (mostly in the video, FYI) and helps to tell the story of the many tangible tissues of wire, towers, and satellites that make up the ephemeral-feeling internet. 

Building Things: 

• Dragon Innovation, a manufacturing and logistics consulting services company in the Boston area, has been acquired by the electronics component distributor Avnet. It suggests that companies that have built their market power by supplying a handful of giant corporations are looking for ways to hedge their bets against those same giant customers being disrupted by scrappier, faster moving hardware startups. It's getting harder and harder to ignore the proverbial little guys. 

More next week. 

Insights 8.21

Design:

• A designer has built himself a (formerly) secret little studio underneath a bridge. While it's got performative portfolio fodder written all over it, it's also a lovely project that gets at real questions of untapped spaces, the informal social aspects of infrastructure, and how little publicly accessible space is legally accessible to the public- and for anyone who seeks solitude within a populous city it's a tempting daydream of what could be. 

Machines for Moving: 

• Leave-it-anywhere bike share programs sound great in theory: lots of flexibility for riders in a way that maps human activity instead of property developer interests, but the reality is more complex. Human transportation (whether packed subway car, traffic jam or cyclists jockeying in their narrow bike lanes) is more than a logistics problem- it's all about following a set of tacit social norms. Scott Smith has a thoughtful post about how the "leave-it-anywhere" bikes bring their own set of nudges and knocks to the fabric of our urban transportation landscape. Part of the complication here is the intrusion of private companies (who may or may not be scraping data and reselling it) letting public spaces get entangled in their systems without participating in those places themselves, only showing up, deploying a technology and running off. It's akin to Australia's problems of the cane toad, where an outside idea that's supposed to fix a pesky local problem only ends up supplanting it with it its own unique and unfamiliar headache.

The Engineered Earth: 

• We stumbled upon this series of CGI-enhanced photos from artist Dillon Marsh that depict the volume of the desired, extracted mineral in the context of the carved up landscape that came between prospector and riches. It's a simple premise but has a quiet resonance in demonstrating how wasteful and myopic our supply chains often are. As humanity steps toward near double digit billions it's easy to lose track of exactly how wide and deep our footprint of making has grown. The planet can support so much, but in the absence of stewardship the riches won't last long.

Energy: 

• An interesting article about how California's electrical grid (which has a significant amount of solar inputs) was tuned to deal with the short-lived shortage of the eclipse. 

More next week. 

Insights 8.11

Design:

• A little rumination from John Brownlee on an obscure line of toys and how the contrast between their seemingly generic character and minute details produces the same kind of sensation that more upscale, iconic products are known for: "A mass-produced object that feels unique. This is the beautiful contradiction—the strong-weak force—that spiritually bind together every great industrial design. An Eames chair has it. An iPhone has it. And, for me, a M.U.S.C.L.E. figure has it."
• The fantastical world of cultures and creatures in the Game of Thrones TV series has real world roots: Broadly has a nice behind-the-scenes look at the labor in producing costumes and props fit for on-screen royalty. 

Labor Pains: 

• Automation is likely going to eat more jobs in sectors that have historically (at least in the U.S.) employed more men than women. 

• One of the big "Web 2.0" concepts was the notion that creators could cut out greedy middlemen and reach global audiences directly, on their terms, and empower a whole new set of artists, writers, and musicians. For the most part that concept hasn't played out according the utopian-creator vision, rather the winners have been the fast-growing startups grabbing up content for aggregation, accruing massive audiences and paying out pennies to the authors (if anything at all). One notable exception is Patreon, a platform that hosts some 50,000 creators with a much more direct and transparent audience-to-builder payment process than say, YouTube or Spotify. The Verge has a solid piece profiling the platform, a handful of creators and some critics of the practice. The main concerns are around managing the expectations of a fan-hive that pays out money in dribs and drabs- that one must become not just a great musician or writer, but a great walking, talking, human brand that people can identify with which can mean truncating the true complexity of a person and their experiences. As with the rise of "personal brands" to maximize career opportunities and income, professionals of all stripes find themselves doing more and more performative work to demonstrate value, along with fulfilling the labor of their actual job descriptions. 

Just A Game: 

• The bizarre story of how White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon was once in charge of trying to legitimize a company called IGE, that operated in the "gray market" of trading real dollars for virtual goods in video games, as well as running massive "gold farming" operations where low-paid workers toiled in digital fantasy lands in order to accrue virtual gold. We've covered these digital goods marketplaces in the past, mostly looking at the cultural curiosity factor and how Veblen goods can work even when they are not tangible- this story shows a bit of the uglier side of how virtual spaces can reduce friction for the worse, enabling new forms of exploitation, monitoring, and control over labor. 

Up in the Air: 

• 3DRobotics, the U.S. based drone tech company that once made its own hardware before shifting to software only, has decided to partner up with DJI, the China-based global leader in designing, building, and selling consumer/prosumer drones. That's a tough break for other drone companies in that space that were already far behind DJI in terms of sales and overall usership. We expect to see even deeper job cuts and possible closures/fire sale acquisitions of some of the remaining consumer drone companies in the next year. The only obvious threat to DJI's long winning streak is the recent order given to soldiers in the U.S. Army to stop using them due to concerns around data sharing. Popular Science has a little more context on the consumer drone usage by the U.S. military here. 

Bias and Brains: 

• Sci-Fi often falls flat when it comes to dealing with how the cultural complexities of race impact society and the implementation of technology. While dystopian stories are often perceived as warnings about the future, they also function as reconfigured stories about the present state of world: the themes of oppression, the powerful using technology to bend the have-nots to their will, and vast disparities in quality of life are with us today - just with fewer robots and exoskeletons. 

 

More next week.