Insights 1.15

 Design:

• Design trends from CES, as observed by Core77. We question the notion that what is put on display by large corporations endlessly-seeking quarter over quarter growth is really evidence of trends, but it's informative to see what those companies would like to be the trends of the moment. 
   

Roadmapping the Future:

• Behind the plethora of obscure brands thrown at you by web or mobile ads is a mesh of niche e-commerce tools, digital surveillance, AliExpress goods, and gig-economy-precariats drop shipping those same goods. It's a flurry of nearly meaningless activity, a 21st century arbitrage that obfuscates consumer choice, and adds noise to an already cacophonous system of trade. These gameable systems have stifled some of the internet's earlier free-wheeling energy. Micro-enterprises (along with artists, writers, and musicians) could previously gain exposure primarily through the word of mouth that followed quality of goods or content, slowly building a loyal following capable of extending their message for free on large social platforms. That technique has mostly gone away, now creators and small businesses must pay for each additional unit of reach, increasing customer acquisition costs and leaving less money for improving the products themselves. WIRED's profile of the Outlier brand covers their pursuit of advanced fabric and construction methods, but also how the company's early tactics leveraging an engaged customer base and word of mouth will no longer get them the publicity they need. 

Feeding the Future: 

• Agricultural lands of the future will likely be populated with more autonomous equipment than human farmhands, a turn that could maintain or increase yields while reducing the need for harsh herbicides and fertilizer. This could mean organic produce at lower prices and less wear-and-tear on topsoil. 

 

Work-Life: 

• Workers making their livelihoods via platforms like Uber or TaskRabbit can have a difficult time navigating the ins and outs of work given the lack of human management, co-workers, and near-constant attempts of those platforms to extract maximum value from workers. Those factors are product of deliberate design decisions by the app-makers, but workers have found ways to connect by creating forums to share knowledge.
• The modern workday schedule, in the culture since the Industrial Revolution, helps organizations turn time intervals into predictable units of output at the expense of life's natural ebbs and flows. Real Life magazine describes the attempts some are making at "off-peak" living that evades the rigid social fixturing of 9-to-5. 

Virtually There: 

• The most comprehensive examination of all those VR-as-empathy-enabler stories we've seen, from Rose Eveleth. Her speculation on how VR might play a role in everything from harassment training to criminal trials is particularly astute, and highlights how a powerful technology like VR can easily slip from immersive narrative tool to invasive trauma tourism. 

 Communication:

• A recent emergency message declaring an incoming missile was sent in error. Ian Bogost at The Atlantic writes about the technological and political progression of emergency notification system, and how our current era of instantaneous messaging might be make such errors more dangerous than the slowly-diffusing methods of the past. 
• Community owned and operated networks are cheaper and better than their big-business (arguably monopolistic) counterparts. Not exactly surprising, but an idea worth extending to other aspects of life. 

More next week. 

Insights 1.09

Design:

• Why we speak in bubbles, rather than boxes.
   

 Communication:

• At the annual circus of gadgetry known as CES, Google announced their entry into stand-alone video-screen smart home devices similar to Amazon's Echo Show. Google has partnered with JBL, Sony, Lenovo and LG to put out a handful of devices, some of which come with privacy measures like physical camera blockers and the ability to cut power to their onboard microphones. In related news, more details have emerged about Facebook's approach, called Portal. 
   

 Building Things:

• As startups have made agile and iterative product development processes the norm (like beta testing with paying customers, their large, established competitors have been slowly absorbing those lessons and following suit. Along those lines, iRobot is rolling out a beta program for customers with the latest generation of Roombas. Practices like these demand a certain level of tech-savvy (and frustration tolerance) that we're guessing maps pretty well to what their research tells them about their customers but is still an unusual tactic for a mass-market consumer product company.  
• Behind virtually every high-tech hardware device are women workers contributing to product and process improvements without recognition, frequently with meager pay, and under difficult or dangerous conditions. 

Up in the Air: 

• Faine Greenwood has been cataloging the various flavors of drone "crashmas" failures, where modern-day Icarus-types overestimate their piloting abilities, losing track of them, maiming family members, or summarily destroying them through run of the mill high-speed crashes.

Energy: 

• China's government is cracking down on cryptocurrency mining, trying to shift energy utilization to more essential activities. 

Branded: 

• A fascinating read from The Wall Street Journal on how mega-corporations like Unilever misunderstood consumer behaviors in response to globalization: “The more things globalize, the more people want to affiliate with everything that is local. This has led to unbelievable fragmentation.” The company has been working to become more nimble and nuanced, creating their own localized products to stave off micro-brands-turned household names (like Halo Top ice cream) and regional favorites that have superior cultural fluency, better matching needs and desires of specific places and populations. 

Archiving: 

• The guy who writes this newsletter wrote up some thoughts on work done in 2017 (at CLEAR design lab and elsewhere), and projects planned for 2018. 

More next week. 

Insights - holiday break edition

This is a slightly longer version than usual, with stories from the last two weeks.


 Design:

• Great design is not enough to make a product succeed on its own. Good product-market fit, quality marketing, diligent sales efforts, robust engineering and a thousand other factors have to come together as well. This round-up of products or companies that fell flat in 2017 is filled with great industrial design work that met inglorious ends when the other elements failed to fall into place.
• On Western designers lifting aesthetics from China and Thailand, while playing the part of a victimized creators when replica goods are produced.
• Designers and engineers attempt to conjure the future more than most professions, prototyping new methods and improving on inventions of the past. New Year's is a time when we all take on that time traveler role, oscillating between visualizations of the past and future. We attempt to dodge the mistakes and bad habits of the last year(s) for the next go-round, and strategize how best to grasp the promise of a yet-unknown (but certainly better) future. In that spirit, take a look at these computer/machine interfaces from design years past and imagine how boldly futuristic some of them must have felt at the time. It's also a reminder of how difficult it is to predict the future of technology and interfaces, as some of the flopped companies of 2017 listed above could tell you. 

Energy: 

• Tesla is making restrictions on what kinds of customers can use their electric charging stations, specifically barring commercial users. Without the commonplace availability of powering up that petroleum vehicles enjoy, the company faces a real challenge: deal with long queues of customers or delineate policies that will control usage. 

Feeding the Future: 

• Spyce, one of many robotic food technology startups is going to be piloting their technology for the public in Boston's Downtown Crossing area this coming spring. 
   

Work-Life: 

• One common obstacle that women face is that they typically perform more domestic labor than their male peers, cutting down on time in general and especially compromising the intense periods of focused work required for everything from great writing to scientific breakthroughs. The biologist and Nobel-prize winner Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard has created a program specifically to help women relieve these burdens and focus on science, a step that will surely have far-reaching positive ripples. 

Virtually There:

• A Boston area startup called Tactai is developing highly nuanced haptic feedback devices with the plan of such sensory systems finding use in amplifying the impact of AR and VR experiences. 
   

Behavior:

• A very literal form of toxic masculinity: A study suggests that men in the U.S. and China, attempting to assert masculinity, may actively reject environmentally responsible policies as behaviors due to coding them as 'soft' or 'passive' ways of being. 
   

Roadmapping the Future:

• When it comes to consumer hardware, 2017 definitely felt like the year of the smart speaker and by extension the smart home, as huge numbers of Alexa-powered Amazon products and Google Home devices shipped out into the world and landed on kitchen counters, nightstands, and living room bookshelves. The speed at which this trend has been moving is as startling as the associated privacy concerns, and it doesn't show signs of stopping. 2018 will likely reveal some polished efforts and new approaches to the form from brands more closely associated with high quality consumer electronics than Amazon is, which could turn the smart speaker category into one of the most significant mass culture technology moments since the jump from feature-phones to smartphones. 
• MIT Technology Review's best GIFs of 2017 offers a visually dazzling sliver of the cutting edge in robotics, biology, and material science from the past year.

Branded: 

• Brands are constructed in attempt to differentiate products (often in an artificial capacity) and capture marketshare through psychographic tactics. While brands can get people to pay a premium for a commodity good, their vaguely anthropomorphic qualities are also alienating to large swaths of people and can stand in the way of people really getting what they want. Mindy Yang has opened shop in New York called Perfumarie, with the intention of stripping away the branded aspects of scents in order to find what people really like. Many customers find themselves surprised at the outcomes, choosing scents that they might avoid in everyday life due to branding concepts that conflict with their sense of self. This underscores the fact that more consumer choice can lead to inferior experiences for people even as it fattens the bottom-line for brands.

More next week.