Insights 12.11

 Design:

• Airbnb has risen to success in part by rendering the complexities of culture and geography into safe, aestheticized set-dressing for one's wanderlust to take place in. In 2017, the manmade borders of the world seem deadly sharp, social landscapes slipping from wondrous mélange into hateful nationalism. So it should come as no surprise that the shimmering surfaces of Airbnb's platform are an insufficient masking to those tumultuous changes. Rosie Spinks writes of the fading magic of using Airbnb for Quartz. 
• Jony Ive is moving back to day-to-day management of the design team at Apple.  

Work-Life: 

• We've written previously of how precarious and performative making a living out of creative work done in the semi-public sphere of platforms like Patreon can be. Patreon just announced a change to their pricing model, with adjustments sure to make life harder for the creators with smaller followings (basically 98% of Patreon). For a look at what the experience of working within a platform like Patreon is really like, check out the firsthand account of Brent Knepper, via The Outline. 

Machines for Moving: 

• The massive mining company Rio Tinto has invested heavily in similarly massive autonomous vehicles to roam their extraction sites in hopes of cutting labor costs enough to protect the company from the inevitable bust phase of mining market cycles.  
   

Material Culture: 

• Recycling is not the environmental panacea to rampant consumption it is often painted to be. The economics are difficult, the value of materials tends to fall sharply upon first reprocessing, and the recycling stream itself can be incredibly messy with poorly sorted materials, food debris, and other foulings contaminating what were planned as neat and tidy systems. China has been a significant recycler of U.S. materials, but with a recent ban on various foreign waste products, that relationship is changing abruptly, leaving many U.S. recycling programs scrambling for alternatives. 

 Branded:

• Amazon's high-volume, low-margin model has found like-minded partners in the consumer electronics world, leading to semi-generic brands touting bargain priced but effective tech to rival the likes of Nest and GoPro. One of the forces driving this trend is Amazon's own depth and breadth of reviews, effectively de-risking unknown companies for customers, which in turn may drive midlevel name brands to switch up their strategies and total ad spend. Amazon has made side-by-side comparison possible on a massive scale only dreamt of by malls or big box retailers, and in doing so has revealed just how few goods escape existing as simple commodities, despite being dressed up in elaborate branding efforts. Name recognition still matters, of course, but the pricing premium that familiarity once commanded seems to be dropping rather quickly. 

• Embedding the DNA of others into the skin via tattooing. 

More next week. 

Insights 12.04

Design:

• Rituals punctuate our daily lives, and holidays reveal just how anciently-rooted many of those rituals are. All those rituals have been 'designed' at some point, within the particular contours of cultural context, but what would a contemporary practice of ritual-designing look like? The Stanford d.school attempted a study of that question last year, but this season is a good time to revisit the project: people are bringing fragments of the outdoors inside and celebrating feast days as we lurch towards the shortest, darkest days. Perhaps our ancient relatives felt a palpable drift towards a likely doom in that slow waning of sunlight. In uncertain times especially, our rituals help steel us against the fearsome unknown. Formalized, aestheticized practices provide just enough a social umbrella through their artifice to gather up the people we care most about, huddling around what little light there is. We will the days longer, fabricating hope out of thin, cold air, tiptoeing to the precipice with clear eyes and full hearts. Even in highly technological and secular times, rituals remain as common as they are vital.

• NASA shared a bunch of conceptual paintings and renderings from over the years, comparing them side by side with the final systems that were ultimately built. Like rituals, the ability to invent shared symbols and imagery to rally others around is a uniquely human superpower, a pseudo-magic creating the conditions for change. In design and engineering, plans, drawings, renderings serve this communicative function. Those images persuade, cultivate buy-in, and weave disparate threads of multiple disciplines into a solid, unified cable of labor.

 Building Things:

• Some sound wisdom on how hardware startups should go about building their early teams, and what does and doesn't make sense to outsource to external players. The article counters the startup-world advice trend of advocating for internal design teams always. The reality is that new product lines for hardware startups tend to be infrequent, and keeping a full internal ID team productive and engaged between those product launches can be challenging and costly. In general, early hires should be reserved for things that require continual work (manufacturing logistics) or fairly rapid iterations of shippable-improvements (firmware, software). 
   

On Screen: 

• An honest and detailed postmortem from Tony Zhang and Taylor Ramos on their long running video-essay project "Every Frame A Painting," which analyzed creative choices within film. Among the topics in the post: the immense amount of time that goes into crafting content that is consumed within minutes (Tony says the average edit time alone for a single minute of video essay was 8 hours), the pressures of an audience to follow a very narrow path, and the difficulty of making such an endeavor even approach a break-even point, despite most their videos having views ranging from 500,000 to over 9 million. 
   

Branded: 

• Whether it's dying malls, or Amazon's ever-expanding house-brands, traditional retailers find themselves scrambling for smaller and smaller scraps of the market. Nike recently made an announcement that from the 30,000 or so retail partners hawking the sportswear-giant's goods, they would focus their energies (and dollars) on just forty. Those fortunate forty are likely expected to create more 'experiential' retail approaches that create enough spectacle and engagement to make the stodgy brick-and-mortar stage into something more. 

Behavior: 

• Though the world of startups and technology emphasizes shipping speed and rapidly iterating to find your way to product-market fit, a study detailed in Harvard Business Review points out that high-performing teams spend about 20% more time defining strategy than less fruitful firms. 

More next week. 

Insights 11.27

 Design:

• Emma Sewell and Harriet Wallace-Jones, the textile designers behind the fabrics of London transit on creative partnership and the shorthand communication that develops between long-term collaborators. 
• An insider story of a small design firm that was acquired by Google in 2011, now operating independently again. Regular readers will know we've kept a (skeptical) eye on the trend of tech companies and business consulting firms buying up boutique design shops, and this idea of a firm being spun back out into the world makes us wonder if similar reversals will soon be happening elsewhere.

 Big Business:

• An interview with tech reporter Scott Kirsner on the lukewarm performance of internal innovation labs within large corporations. Kirnser has some suggestions on choices that can improve the odds (having the lab headed by a trusted operator, getting alignment on timelines, etc.) but the category is littered corporate window dressing, and defunct programs, with very few successes. From a longer-view of history standpoint, this makes sense - not all businesses are built for big-picture, blue-sky innovation, nor should they be. Plenty of firms get ahead and stay there through much more mundane, nuts-and-bolts improvements of the incremental variety. 
   

Machines for Moving: 

• China's 3rd largest bike sharing service has folded, leaving many many thousands of orphaned bicycles behind. The article questions whether such a large, sprawling transportation program (dock-less bike sharing) can be effectively managed by a private, for-profit enterprise. 
   

Work-Life: 

• Some employers are adding 'climate leave' policies to help beleaguered workers cope with the fallout from superstorms. 
• A beautiful and blistering indictment of the always-on, always-optimizing form of work that bleeds into life, until the last drips of joy are bled out of our days. The author points out the role that technology (both hard and soft, tangible and theoretical) plays in this long trend, from the metronomic pace of machinery in the Industrial Revolution, to Taylor's tyrannical time and motion studies. Today, it is the social media gamification of what were once our quietest moments of private leisure: the cup of tea, the sleeping dog, the setting sun. Of course, our time is finite, and that limited tenure on this planet inspires a fearful desire to make an impact, to perform meaningful actions, and assemble a worthy legacy before the hourglass runs empty. Perhaps there is no balance to strike between the big projects of life and the pleasures of letting the hours slip by without an anxious plan. Still, it is worth wasting some time tomorrow lost in smaller plans and undocumented hours, in order to taste of life more fully. 

More next week.