Insights 2.06

Design:

• A great article on how as gender roles around cooking shift to be a bit more balanced, the way cooking appliances and kitchens are styled has pivoted toward the stereotypically masculine. The author calls attention to OXO, which unlike many other household good brands has carved out a different path: away from gendered ideas and towards forms designed to fit any human. Such a balance is of course precisely how a tool-type object should be approached: flexible, open, with as little prescriptive signaling as possible. 
• Cameron Tonkinwise on the myth of a simple product.

Making Technology Work for Us: 

• A short documentary on the farmers fighting for the right to repair their tractors, and its potential policy impact on large consumer electronics companies. 

Seen/Unseen: 

• LiDAR imaging in Guatemala has revealed that Maya cities were larger, more densely populated, and more complex than the work of earlier archaeologists suggested. So often we are preoccupied with how technologies will shape and impact the future, but the use of something like LiDAR to better understand where we came from, how we lived, and how earlier societies were structured will likely provide greater insights into how we ought to do things going forward than wide-eyed sci-fi speculation. 

Automatons: 

• In retail environments, shoppers seem to largely ignore robots.

Behavior:

• "What can you possibly change?" On how social norms will have to morph (through the pressures applied by persistent weirdos, growing in number) to develop common, compatible ways of living less damaging lifestyles.

Add/Subtract: 

• 3D printer company Desktop Metal has announced some software called Live Parts that looks a lot like topology optimization but makes some claims of greater functionality and value. An early version of the program will be available to SolidWorks users as of today. Even if it only matches similar topology optimization software, making that kind of technology widely available increases the opportunities for engineers to begin implementing those techniques, and for more direct printed parts to find their way into real world products and applications. 

Material Culture:

• Bloomberg examines (with some great visuals and infographics) the reasons people in the U.S. are spending less money on apparel than they used to. Notably, in 2010 average spending on technology products eclipsed average apparel spend. The extent to which a smart phone, smart watch, or set of headphones make up some of the same social functions as brand-name fashion is another element worth considering. Those devices are more persistent, more personal, and as visible in our day-to-day as any article of clothing.

More next week. 

Insights 1.29

Design:

• When objects or devices are designed to work for a full spectrum of ability, they tend to work better for everyone. This is not a new idea, but it's underapprecatiated and underapplied in most design processes. The perfectly healthy and athletic body that many teams imagine when developing their product is just that: an imaginary being divorced from the reality of life. Whether it's an injury, the impact of aging, illness or something else, an individual's level of ability, dexterity, and strength varies throughout life, and from person to person. The more we design with the full range of factors in mind, the better life gets for all of us. 

Body/Image: 

• David Rose and IDEO on gesture being a primary interface of the future due to falling cost and rising capabilities of spatial sensors. There are some good examples given of instances where gesture is more convenient than voice or tangible interfaces like buttons, it's hard to overlook that spatial sensors used as an always-on interface would greatly increase privacy risks and concerns with their capability to detect exact body position and movement. Along with the complexities of correctly interpreting culturally disparate meanings for the same gestures, body motion based interfaces are likely to continue more as novelty than day-to-day interaction method. 

Data Logging: 

• The data that follows in the wake of our collective actions is sometimes referred to as digital exhaust, a semi-transparent haze of particles in motion. In the case of exercise-tracking app Strava, the company used those particles to develop some beautiful visualizations in the form of heat maps marking exercise activity all over the globe. Upon closer examination however, those heat maps seem to reveal secret military bases, unceremoniously exposing data that governments have spent copious amounts of time and money to protect. 

Machines for Moving: 

• Despite some bumps along the way, dockless bicycles in China are having some desirable effects in terms of reduced oil consumption. Shenzhen's Transport Commission says that it's cut private car travel by 10%.

 Material Culture:

• Humans have been celebrating or commemorating events with objects from our earliest days. While It may have taken our ancient ancestors minutes or hours to produce a single bead for a celebratory occasion, they can now be produced nearly instantaneously in plastic. One result of such high volume, low cost production methods is the drastic devaluing of goods: what was once exceptional becomes common and disposable, as a recent cleaning of New Orleans catch basins underscores. The city found over 90,000 lbs. of plastic Mardi Gras beads among the detritus. 

More next week. 

Insights 1.21

Design:

• People seem to be really excited about Nintendo's latest product combining cardboard constructions and digital gaming. The low-tech charm of cardboard is powerful because it is simple, and in its simplicity, evocative. It's similar to the point Scott McCloud makes of abstraction being more relatable than realism. Imagination allows people to tune experiences exactly to their own aesthetic desires and narrative interests, but as an element of design or UX it's largely ignored by companies. The typical business preference favors tightly controlling experiences to protect brand sentiment and expectations, rather than enabling customers to invent and alter on their own. Maybe because Nintendo has been in operation since 1889, they have a better sense for just when to use imaginative blank space instead of pure technological power, whether the format is computer screens or cardboard.
   

Body/Image: 

• Companies are seeking more detailed data on the bodies of their customers, promising a better value in perfectly fitting clothes in exchange. Privacy advocates point out that such information is akin to medical data, but doesn't have the same legal protections given to patient information. Additionally, some e-commerce companies like StichFix seek behavioral data through detailed on-boarding questionnaires and accessing Instagram and Pinterest accounts in order to better algorithmically curate the styles offered to a given customer. 
• A design study on how various makeup companies approach skin color palettes.
• Google's software combining museum collections and facial analysis to match selfie photos with their fine art doppelgängers has gone viral, but strict laws on biometric data collection limit where it can be used. Not surprisingly, the matching function has drawn criticism for how well it handles race, an issue exacerbated by museum collections that skew heavily towards caucasian subjects and creators. 

Work-Life: 

• On hobbies, work, and the slippery process of one becoming the other.

Up in the Air: 

• A staggering number of companies are now working on drones. As with any hardware technology trend, there will be real value and applications around the core pursuit (presumably better, cheaper, faster drones) but the more significant outcome may be in other sectors benefitting from such scale driving down component costs. It's likely we will see a connected increase in products leveraging those components in ways that have nothing to do with drones, much in the same way the "smartphone wars" helped create the right conditions for a wave of consumer hardware startups. 
• NASA engineers and designers had some strange notions of what the first women astronauts would need. 

 Behavior:

• A smart review of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation from The New Inquiry. Among other things the book highlights how some of the most famous 'focus group gone wrong' stories are actually erroneous tales: in truth (in the cases of New Coke and Edsel cars) executives ignored the collective voices and fell into product failures as a result. Focus groups are certainly flawed as a research technique (people make different decisions privately than among peers or strangers, getting representative samples is difficult, etc.) but the larger takeaway is that research best practices require real listening. Today's research trend of 'user personas' faces similar issues arising from sloppy execution. Done right, personas help guide development, translating behavioral research from noisy data to clearly addressable needs and wants. Done poorly (which unfortunately is usually the case), personas boil whole populations down into crude fabrications, leading to biases reflected in design, engineering, and messaging choices. 

More next week.