Insights 3.21

 Design:

• How minimalism, normcore, Marie Kondo's organizational system, and the smooth pastel backdrops of countless startup product photo shoots resemble a strange puritanical mutation of markets overstuffed with opportunities for consumption. That uncluttered but crisp look has been holding on strong as a trend for years now, perhaps because the blankness of such a visual style suggests to us that there is room for a few more objects in our lives, a few more clothes in the closet. 
•   IKEA spends a great deal of time and money researching how people the world over live, drawing on extensive ethnographic research and trawling through their own data on sales and trends. IKEA's latest collection is a departure, that replaces the bright plastics and the smooth particle board constructions of a self-delighted consumer with the earthy sparseness of a pseudo-spiritual hermit withdrawing from a troubling world into a domestic cave. The copy for their new line is riddled with references to anxieties and coping techniques both metaphysical and mundane, with statements like "Take a break from your connected, complicated life," and "The perfect place to open your chakras...or a pizza box." 
• Continuum Innovation is the latest (and one of the largest) design consultancies to get acquired. 

Body/Image:  

• Bose has been funding a lot of hardware startups and academic research in recent years, in a wide range of categories: everything from wearables to novel sensors. Now the company, best known for their audio devices, is trying to break into augmented reality devices with a $50MM fund. 

Machines for Moving: 

• A simple explainer of how autonomous vehicles "see" and the systems that may have failed in the first fatal self-driving car accident that took place on March 18th.

On Screen: 

• Amazon's original programming seems to be an effective means of acquiring customers, claiming that shows like The Man in the High Castle brought new Prime subscribers at a cost of around $63.

Building Things:  

• What it's like to try to build a startup when you're far from the well-funded coasts, and a look at how Digital-Key built their business in rural Minnesota, starting decades ago. 

More next week. 

Insights 3.11

Design:

• Apple's position as a consumer tastemaker remains strong, with multiple brands picking up the "notch" look that was maligned by tech critics in the earliest days of the iPhone X. 
• It's awfully hard to solve a problem originated by a tech widget, by designing an alternative widget. A tech reporter tried out the intentionally de-featured Light Phone and found it didn't remedy bad habits any more than taking a mindful audit of our actions can. 
• John Maeda's 2018 Design in Tech Report is out. This year it's heavily loaded with stats and thoughts on the growth of "computational design," though it's thin and a bit misleading on how that term connects to the world of physical goods: a digital plotter and a desktop vacuum forming machine are tagged as "...low cost, sophisticated computational design tools" despite being only marginally different from product offerings that have existed for decades. The content on inequality, conversational interfaces, and the increasing usage of machine learning for designing objects and images rings true, and are among the more certain cultural waves set to significantly impact people and work in the coming years. 

Building Things: 

• A really interesting behind-the-scenes at the desktop milling machine company Bantam Tools (formerly Other Machine Co.), that was acquired by Bre Pettis. Both Bantam's founder Danielle Applestone and Bre Pettis came to the world of tech through circuitous paths, excited about the possibilities of what more accessible fabrication tools could do to transform the landscape of opportunities for others.
• An update on Liquidmetal Technologies, the metallic molding company that has struggled to match the reality of their business position with the hype surrounding their manufacturing process.

Roadmapping the Future:  

• Using scrappy prototypes to drive towards global sustainability goals in a more rapid, concrete, localized way. Among the provocations in the article is the idea that a more ad-hoc and participatory style of building can help to avoid the negatives of a global, top-down approach (erasure of minority cultures, prescriptive technocratic values that ignore the complexity of human life, etc): "Transformed into an open culture, prototyping instead becomes a convivial activity for community building and alliance formation. This means bringing people together around a shared concern, and exploring new norms and mobilising relationships through prototypes; building alliances for new institutions more than portable innovations; negotiating political programmes and managing conflicts over social changes more than managing innovation; mapping pathways for dynamic, adaptable routines rather than rolling out standard models."

Automatons: 

• A John Henry-esque competition between human and robotic bricklayers. 

 

More next week. 

Insights 3.05

Design:

• The dubious design solutions to the problem of noise in workplaces, especially open plan offices.
• Many brilliant designs and inventions came from enslaved people in the Americas, but the rights to those designs were often stolen by slaveowners or fell in a legal no-man's land. 

Building Things: 

• A post from Bolt's Ben Einstein on so-called predicate companies, or companies that provide evidence for a template of consumer behavior. While Einstein places the indicators at the company level, really it's a larger question of how culture as a whole (commercial or not) is changing. 
• While DIY firearms are not new, the mix of precise, low-skill digital fabrication tools and the increasing pressure to regulate the gun industry in the face of seemingly endless tragedies has created a hot market for weapon-building systems, and legislators are scrambling to draft laws that could address the risks of a more diffuse firearm production system. 
• LEGO has been on campaign for shifting to bioplastics for some time now, with a goal of ditching petroleum-derived ABS completely by 2030. They recently announced that parts being produced now are 1-2% sugarcane derived polyethylene. It's not exactly an impressive percentage, but given the scale of LEGO, it will still have a significant impact. 

Waste:  

• The Minnesota legislature is working on crafting policy that would require electronics manufacturers to make replacement parts available. While such policies would create some pains for consumer electronics manufacturers, the positive outcomes will be more circular markets and efficient, thoughtfully designed products. Supporting many generations of product is a huge challenge from a logistics and manufacturing standpoint (tooling gets retired, storing inventory is costly), but the falling cost of producing parts on-demand through additive methods could help to address those pains in the not-too-distant future. A quick search of the 3D printing service bureau/store Shapeways demonstrates that consumers have a desire to repair and replace broken parts on their products, but few companies behind the original products do much of anything to support that behavior. 

Mapping Marketplaces: 

• Amazon's willingness to play host to sellers large and small means the platform struggles with counterfeit goods more than their brick-and-mortar counterparts. The company featured in that article goes further in their language, saying that Amazon is complicit in the trade of counterfeit goods because of their policy choices. 

More next week.