Insights 5.21

Design:

• An analysis of design failures in the open-source, 3D printed tourniquets being used in the recent conflicts in Gaza. 

Building Things: 

• From The Washington Post: how proposed changes to trade policies from the Trump administration threaten segments of the economy that are growing (like advanced manufacturing) but depend on globe-spanning supply chains. 

Body/Image: 

• Sports, like dance, is always about aesthetics: we are transfixed not by the mechanistic progress of one team against another, or the breaking of a speed record, but by the unusual elegance in how that work is performed, or those tasks achieved. It shouldn't come as a surprise then that young athletes are using visual-first platforms like Instagram to draw attention to their abilities so that scouts might discover them and offer handsome scholarships, and later convert those large, adoring audiences into paying customers buying into their personal brand should they be fortunate enough to go pro. 

Waste:  

• Communities in the U.S. are at the very beginning of absorbing the fallout from China tightening up its recycling import policies, dramatically reducing what it accepts from other nations. One report suggests that this change will trickle down to more recyclables being diverted to landfills, accelerating how quickly landfills are becoming saturated, perhaps hitting that point in as little as 13 years. The power of recycling has always been a bit of a smokescreen for making rampant consumption seem okay: don't feel bad about all those soda cans because we can reprocess them. The reality is that most materials are rapidly down-cycled into inferior materials that have limited value, making it difficult for recyclers to reliably profit from the practice. Policies and planning for reuse (sterilizing glass bottles for another go-round), or simply consuming less are vastly preferable, though inconvenient for corporations hell-bent on pumping out more and more marginally profitable widgets one quarter to the next. 

Machines for Moving:  

• An interesting conflict in Greater Boston area bike-shares: Boston and a few surrounding cities have made exclusive deals with a docked bike-sharing system, and a new dockless competitor working with neighboring cities has resulted in what amounts to a bureaucratically-tinged turf war; with the docked bike loyalist municipalities impounding any rogue dockless bike found in their jurisdiction. The resulting patchwork of services is a perfect example of how absurd and wasteful certain kinds of public-private partnerships can be. 

Material Culture:  

• Helen Rosner on the viral social media stunt of a restaurant selling gold-covered chicken wings, and the ancient appeal of conspicuous consumption, once reserved for royals, now open to your every day finance bro or micro-influencer. Eating gold is obviously on the extreme end of the consumption broadcasting spectrum, but relates to more common forms like only ever sporting spotless sneakers: an indicator that one has the ability to easily consume far and above what is utilitarian, through a materialistic embrace that implies a possible transcending of our world of flesh and dust.

Branded:  

• Hasbro has won a trademark on the smell of Play-Doh, a fairly rare victory: as of 2015, the U.S. Patent Office recognized a mere 10 officially protected scents. 

More next week. 

Insights 5.12

Design:

• Kyle Chayka on Allbirds, Everlane, and other blasé Silicon Valley brands reflecting the casually affluent and white-collarless world that produced them: "Allbirds’s glorified slippers are most useful if all you do is pad around an office all day, and even then you should still avoid inclement weather. They’ll support your feet for a few hours at a standing desk but not a service job. The informal style of Entireworld would be great for an L.A. creative director but not if your job has an actual dress code. The innate exclusivity is wrapped in a veneer of non-exclusivity. Functionalism is affected but not enacted. It echoes how digital platforms like Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb are meant to be democratic—anyone with an internet connection can use them—but in practice they work in very different ways for different users, benefitting some and excluding or exploiting others."
• IBM's design history as represented through posters and typography. 

Building Things: 

• Understanding the history of your industry, and the companies that came (and collapsed) before, greatly increases the chances of finding the unique recipe that will make it possible to survive long enough to make an impact.

Automatons: 

• A look at what product-market fit wayfinding looks like in a robotics startup. We've worked with a number of robotics startups over the years, for both consumer and industrial applications. In some ways, industrial robots resemble appliances: they are given particular controlled contexts, and very specific jobs to do. Consumer robots on the other hand, operate with the expectation of being able to handle a weirder, wider array of scenarios and spaces, all without skilled technicians to set them up or maintain them. Add to that the pricing pressures on consumer products, and the opportunity space shrinks down to a tiny sliver. To succeed within that sliver is very nearly a magic trick, requiring shrewd engineering, brilliant marketing, thoughtful design, and as with all things, a good deal of timing and luck. 
• Grasping is among the technical hurdles preventing more useful robots from entering complex and constantly changing environments like the home, though the field is progressing quickly towards greater gripping capabilities and comprehensive modeling of how objects exist and move in the world. For now, the costs of the combined vision, computing, and mechanical grasping systems are above the consumer level threshold, instead serving industries like warehouse fulfillment and food packing. 
• An article from the Boston Globe on the freshly made meal food-vending startup Spyce. The author writes of "robots making meals" though that's a vast overstatement of what is really happening. Such linguistic simplification on behalf of eager technologists isn't just inaccurate, it's an act of erasure for the real, very human labor toiling behind the curtain. In the case of Spyce, the food is picked, cleaned, sorted, and cut by human hands before it reaches the automated hoppers that then combine, heat, and dispense. Put into a more complete context, the robots are not so magical. The smoke-and-mirrors show here resembles the broader branding mirage common to top-tier restaurants and tech companies alike: one or more prominent (usually white, usually male, usually affluent) individuals act as the public-facing symbol of bold, brand new innovation while behind the scenes the products (whether gourmet meals or slick smartphones) are only possible because of the many skilled hands (often of color, often female, often underpaid) performing the substance of the work itself. 

Roadmapping the Future:  

• A wide-ranging story on vaping, teen culture, the startups challenging the gigantic tobacco industry, and a bit of history on smoking in general. The anecdote of teenagers buying vapes wholesale on Alibaba with pre-paid debit cards and then hawking them via sales promoted through Snapchat feels like a hyper-capitalist, U.S. flavor of cyberpunk come true—a profitable hustle by young people as clever as they are aware, nihilism delivered complete with CGI dancing hot dogs, exchanging wry imagery as the world heads towards disaster through no fault of their own. When the world burns, might as well make that money, might as well vape. 

Upgrading Ourselves:  

• While citizens of wealthy nations enjoy bespoke medical implants or fantasize about augmented reality futures and cyborg upgrades, much of the world gets by without even the most basic of assistive technologies. The New York Times describes the huge impact that bringing glasses to people living in poverty around the world can have, and some of the technologies that are making it easier to diagnose and treat impaired vision. 

 

More next week. 

Insights 4.29

Design:

• Snap Inc is putting out their 2nd generation of camera glasses, Spectacles. The first model was maligned by critics who pointed to the stories excess inventory as a sign that it was indeed a massive design failure. We disagreed with that perspective, citing some well-informed design choices that many wearable tech companies misunderstood. It looks like Snap itself is still bullish on the Spectacles product, with plans for a broader (and more traditional) marketing campaign this time around. The design has also been toned down a bit, with the contrasting bright yellow ring around the camera being replaced with tones closer to the color of the frame.

Communication: 

• A fascinating and troubling first-person perspective on virtual dating assistants, the people hired to run online dating communications for clients. The employer recommends tactics to the crew of personal content crafters that resemble sales techniques for low margin, highly transactional products: fire off some quick attempts to draw in the prospective buyer, and if those fail, move on, rather than taking the time to have a real conversation and build mutual understanding. 
• Sarah Jeong has a compelling analysis of Facebook's power (and the difficulty of leaving the platform) being rooted in optimizing the mostly invisible emotional labor of building, and maintaining the myriad of human relationships in our lives. Jeong remarks on the initial joy of leaving the noise of the platform, and then the accidental atrophying of real-world social networks made invisible to her: "The real problem only began to present itself much later. I missed big personal news from people I knew. I missed dance parties and house parties and casual get-togethers. I was the last to find out about births and the last to see baby pictures. Classmates got engaged and married and I didn’t find out until after my hiatus." 

Waste:  

• Direct to consumer e-commerce makes acquiring goods easier than ever, but little has been done to deal with the end of a product's life. Mattresses are among the most voluminous objects consumers regularly acquire via the internet, yet few options for responsible processing exist: "From 2015 to 2017, those three states recycled about 1 million mattresses. That’s an impressive 11 million cubic feet of landfill space saved, but it’s only 5 percent of the 20 million mattresses tossed out every year." 

Building Things: 

• Amazon created a version of their Alexa-powered Echo devices designed specifically for children. As the article points out, Microsoft, Apple, and Google all have their own voice-based, always-on digital assistants, but Amazon is the first to ship a product taking that technology and focusing it on kids. Amazon's researchers are likely interested in how language, phrasing, and lines of questioning develop from childhood on, as a better mapping of human learning processes could dramatically improve the capabilities of their AI products, but privacy concerns loom large. The dangers here extend beyond the usual corporate surveillance and data breaches: if parents have access to what amounts to a child's dialogue with a 'digital friend' or their inner monologue, there may be a temptation to make well-meaning but misguided interventions that constrict the natural wandering of young minds making sense of the world bit by bit. 
• The smart factory company Tulip is trying to make it easier for customers to get started with their suite of sensors and software, with a bite-sized solution called Factory Kit. While the company. seems to be mostly pursuing medium to large enterprises, micro businesses may reap the benefits from such technologies being broken down into attainable modules that boost efficiency and increase reliability.

More next week.