Insights 7.30

Design:

• How brand works inside and outside an organization, and why visual branding is among the least meaningful elements of creating a sustained success. End-to-end design of experiences (via product, service, and marketing decisions) are more complex, but make up the bulk of how we interpret brands in the wild. 
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Making Technology Work for Us:

• The DIY/hacker ethos behind cooking up pharmaceuticals at home with open-source tech to drastically reduce costs of cures and treatments, though not without some serious risks. 

Machines for Moving: 

• Those small, zippy, and suddenly ubiquitous electric scooters popping up in city after city are more popular and positively rated by people with lower incomes. Wealthier folks are more likely to look disapprovingly at the low-cost, last mile solution, likely due to their disposable income income giving them access to on-demand cars and/or their own vehicles. 
• Trucks for transporting freight are becoming more heavily loaded with sensors and information-sharing systems to increase efficiency and reduce logistical errors. Past press on how technology will impact truckers has focused on pure displacement of human labor by autonomous vehicles, but in light of how problematic those attempts have been so far, the hybrid approach of leveraging augmenting and instrumenting tools will likely be the model for some time.

 

Automatons: 

• Kuri is the latest intentionally humanoid consumer robot to get canceled or scaled back, as voice-based interfaces from Amazon and Google continue to expand and fulfill 90%+ of the functionality their more mechanically complex counterparts. 
• IBM has spent large sums of money marketing the AI abilities of their technology tools, singing their praises for tasks like improving the power grid or diagnosing cancer. From internal documents and doctor accounts, it seems at least that latter claim was dangerously overblown, with reports of IBM's Watson product recommending incorrect and potentially fatal treatment regimens. This gap between the high-tech promise of transformative medical technologies and the the messier reality is not unique to big data or AI schemes: innovations from implants to surgical robots often leave a trail of victims and broken promises as they make their way to technological maturity. Corporations and communities would do well to meet marketing claims with greater skepticism, and their real-world implementation with careful consideration and plenty of safeguards. 

Virtually There: 

• Using AR technology to help journalists explain stories with complex spatial elements.

 Communication:

• An archive of 2,000 test faxes, many of which read as a personalized "hello world" or hopeful or joking communiqués sent out into the void. Sketches, notes, scans of physical objects: these are the cave drawings of a specific moment in human and technological history. 
• The potential conflict between the right to know you're talking to a 'bot, and free speech allowances for letting a bot be a bot, privately.

More next week. 

Insights 7.25

 Design:

• Using data visualization to convey the scale and shifting geographies of U.S. arms exports. While its designed to capture a single category of goods, mapping that flow of deadly objects also reveals changes in policy and just how unstable the delineation between friend and foe has been over time. 
• Holding a magnifying glass up to all the big business and startup talk of designing great user experiences to reveal the myths, suggest alternatives, and better understand how systems can be redesigned. 

Feeding the Future: 

• A California tax incentive designed to get owners of vacant lots to allow agriculture on their properties has failed to take hold, with only four receiving the tax break. It underscores the difficulties of bringing the rural practices of agriculture to bear on urban spaces in a meaningful way that goes beyond the novelty of a hobby farm.

Virtually There:  

• Han Jan Kamps of the hardware VC firm Bolt draws a sharp line between VR and AR, and details the differences in form, benefits, and usability. We tend to agree with the basic arguments presented here: AR is more easily enmeshed with (non-digitized) life itself, whether the mode is work or leisure, and likely has a larger addressable market as a result. 

Up in the Air:

• Facebook is working on internet satellites (rumors have been circulating for some time), and they appear to be fairly far along, claiming that the first will be launched in 2019. While the technological expansion makes strategic business sense, it's also troubling to see the social media company, which has struggled in recent years with 'fake news' scandals and violation of psychological experiment protocols attempting to grab even more power and control. 

Behavior: 

• The Washington Post profiles a handful of transgender men, with their reflections on how transitioning revealed social mores and politics of gender and remapped their day-to-day choices. 

Bias and Brains:

• A study measuring the reactions of participants to different colored robots draws the conclusion that racial bias follows through to robotic subjects. The researchers recommend creating "more diverse" robots, which seems like a bizarre solution. Robots need not reflect the diversity of the human world any more than toasters ought to, and given how racist propaganda of the past impacts present perceptions and policies, conflating people and machines seems especially grotesque. Progress has to be addressed at the level of human society, not by pasting appearances onto automatons and hoping for the best.

More next week. 

Insights 7.16

 Design:

• On the differences between how designers and engineers in China work vs. U.S./Europe: "This is the new shanzhai. It’s open-source on hyperspeed — where creators build on each other’s work, co-opt, repurpose, and remix in a decentralized way, creating original products like a cell phone with a compass that points to Mecca (selling well in Islamic countries) and simple cell phones that have modular, replaceable parts which need little equipment to open or repair."
• How "4D printing" can enable new forms. 
• The ethereal world of social media has a concrete effect on the tangible. "Designing for Instagram" is influencing everything from restaurant menus to museum exhibits. 

Roadmapping the Future: 

• U.S. courts have made a decision in the legal battle between provocateur Cody Wilson (and his making-machines-that-make-guns startup) and the State Department. The State Department argued that his downloadable design files for weapons components violated ITAR (International Trade in Arms Regulations) by allowing anyone in the world with unrestricted internet access to "acquire" firearms via CAD models. While many are viewing this decision as a sure recipe for a bloody, gun-filled society, the reality is that the U.S. is already at that point, and has been for some time. The country is already teeming with guns that are easier to obtain than DIY options and the economies of scale provided by corporate production means incredibly cheap firearms (often subsidized by the juicy military contracts those same manufacturers receive). The more hopeful subtext of this case is that the verdict sets a legal precedent for removing restrictions on independent, non-corporatized production across borders of things beyond guns: useful tools, research devices, replacement parts, and so on. Just as firearms manufacturers (and their lobbyist counterparts) are behind thwarting sensible regulations that could stymie their own profits, corporate producers of all kinds of goods design parts for limited lifespan, ensuring consistent consumption year over year. Simply put, there are plenty of systemic problems whose solutions cannot be entrusted to those that profit from them, and while this verdict has its risks, it's also a vote for giving individuals and communities more tools to opt out of life as mere consumers. Ultimately it's a question of whether we trust our neighbors more or less than the companies that have helped to create the problems we are all facing now. 
• Farhad Manjoo on how the ease of sharing tips, tricks, and skill building exercises for various hobbies underscores what is good about the internet: "There’s something else that has been magical about the experience. Although I took up pottery to go offline, it has driven something surprising for me online: It helped restore my faith in the possibilities and the basic humanity of the internet." 

Body/Image: 

• The politics of being seen, controlling your image, and avoiding the commercialization of radical aesthetics: "For black people, often captured and archived without our consent, these practices of self-documentation can take on a special kind of significance. At events like Afropunk, people play at claiming and disavowing an authentic blackness."
• A first person account of body dysmorphia, surgery, and the process of understanding and claiming one's own body, through any and all available methods.

Shaping Cities:

• Skyscrapers are expensive to maintain, difficult to retrofit with more energy efficient tech, and nearly impossible to tear down beyond a certain height. This vertical approach to city-building is less adaptable to changing population flows or neighborhood demands, like in the case of the vacant 44 story tower in downtown St. Louis. 

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• Since the earliest days of humanity, people have used substances and tools to alter their mental state and improve physical abilities. Maybe it's natural then that today's humans are finding the biometric sensors of wearable technology useful not just for the mundane workday reminders, but for dialing in recreational drug doses. 

Waste:

• Recent drinking straw bans have incited a range of responses, from cheery optimists seeing it as a small but meaningful sign of progress, to disability advocates calling out such policies for creating unnecessary hurdles while having minimal environmental impact. We tend to agree with the latter perspective. User/consumer oriented initiatives like this are designed to incite guilt in the individual while doing little to address the mega corporations doing the most damage to our world. Another challenge with creating effective solutions on the individual level is that accounting for the damage of waste is tricky, and the answers often counterintuitive. The non-straw solution appears to waste more material, and behaviors can make theoretically good practices like reusable canvas bags worse than the current devil of disposable plastic ones. If we are to truly address waste, environmental damage, and climate change, we need to thoughtfully design systems from a bird's eye view, rather than just picking on random objects in our day-to-day. 

More next week.