Insights 9.13

Design:

• Snap says that the 2nd version of their connected camera glasses, Spectacles, are being used 40% more than their initial product offering. Perhaps buoyed by that uptick in usage, the company has released two more frame designs. 

Building Things: 

• Kickstarter has announced a standard test part as a way for project backers to evaluate the performance of 3D printer projects funded on their platform. 

• Established auto manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz are figuring out how tobuild electric power into their existing product lines, which could present a significant threat to Tesla. The big auto companies have proven they can reliably crank out cars and trucks at scale, something Tesla has struggled with, and with that scale comes more pricing leverage on components from their suppliers. 

• Apple is increasingly a wearables company. The Apple Watch and AirPods were met with a fair amount of snark and scorn initially, but those products have flourished even among a large field of competitive, established products. For now, Apple seems to have won the wearables war by applying the same disciplined approach to building solid, desirable products with exceptionally good UX that brought them significant market share in smartphones and computers. 

Waste:  

• Nathan Proctor makes a convincing case that Right to Repair legislation would reduce the cost of medical care by shrinking the maintenance costs associated with complex healthcare equipment like MRI machines. 

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• The Seattle Times draws attention to an Amazon patent that would "put workers in cages" outfitted with mechanical arms, atop robotic platforms. Amazon certainly has a troubling labor history with their contract fulfillment centers, but this piece's scaremongering obscures the more interesting truth: even big, sophisticated tech companies still depend on the flexibility, speed, and complexity of the human mind. 

• An interesting perspective on the value of AR for people will work in the not-distant future: the tech will become the premier method for connecting blue-collar workers (referred to euphemistically as "deskless workers" in the article) to the productive powers of 21st century software and distributed computation. 

Engineering Communities: 

• Largely left to fend for themselves by local and federal governments, organizers in Puerto Rico have taken matters into their own hands to restore power to their communities, both in the literal and figurative senses. Newsweek reports on efforts of anarchists there to create new infrastructure from the ruins.

Archiving: 

• Preserving "endangered" sounds, namely the blips, rumbles, and hums of earlier analog appliances and electronics. 

• Peruse the Web Design Museum to see (or fondly remember) what the look and feel of the internet used to be.

More next week. 

Insights 9.04

Design:

• Farrah Bostic on the value of doing user research the right way, for design, and business in general: "The toolkit that marketing and innovation shares is research. If these are the essential functions of the enterprise, then why the hell are you depriving your organization of the tools it needs to perform those functions?"
• A quite lengthy piece on how speculative design reinforces many of the damaging modes of production and consumption we live with today, rather than pioneering the tools and systems to arrive at better futures. The themes here are not new, but the writing covers the subject over large spans of time and geography, and offers an extensive survey of the thinkers, writers, and designers involved in that conversation. In particular, we recommend reading up on the work of Luiza Prado, Pedro Olivera, James Auger, and Cameron Tonkinwise, all mentioned in the article. 

Building Things: 

• Using metal 3D printing and generative design software from nTopology to develop spinal implants that behave like bone, with 80% porosity in the part. In the same way that early machine tools enabled novel, complex structures to be made inexpensively and reliably (finely threaded screws, gears, etc.), 3D printing is opening up a new vocabulary of mechanically useful forms. 

Body/Image: 

• A clever method for creating an individualized digital model of your form by using a smartphone and patterned bodysuit, similar to motion capture systems used for special effects and video game development. Provided this approach yields accurate models, it may be a significant enabler of mass customization, cheap enough to be used in improving the fit of basic goods like t-shirts and jeans. 

Archiving:  

• Brazil's national museum has burned, potentially damaging or destroying as many as 20 million artifacts. Unfortunately, many of the lost artifacts and documents had not been digitized, and their specifics now only exist in memory, photographs, and notes. 

 Communication: 

• Studying the visual communication styles beyond emoji (collectively called biaoqing) emerging from Chinese internet users. 

 Branded: 

• Brands have often sought to align their products with iconoclasts, usually well after the roughest years of controversy have died down. Apple's famous Think Different campaign used the likenesses of Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, and Mahatma Gandhi, but only after the decades had softened the perceived danger they represented to the status quo. Nike is taking an unusual stance in using athlete Colin Kaepernick to represent their brand, a figure still near the height of their controversy. 

More next week. 

Insights 8.29

Design:

• A critical consideration of Yves Béhar and his company, Fuse. The themes here could be a stand-in for the general state of industrial design: increasingly solving "problems" of the elite, disconnected from the realities of production, innovating only at the surface level, and more fixated on accumulating cash than improving life for all. 
• Back in the heyday of brick and mortar retail, Best Products worked with the design firm SITE to create some fairly surreal and whimsical stores. 

Building Things: 

• A fascinating teardown of Magic Leap's augmented reality headset.
• Some tweets from maker Naomi Wu showing short Z axis FDM 3D printers making signage. It's a great example of the kind of boring, nearly invisible applications for 3D printing that make a good deal of economic sense. Traditional sign making (at least for three dimensional options) requires skilled labor and often multiple fabrication processes of cutting and assembly, all for what is commonly a custom built one-off. 

Communication:  

• Political and social movements require immense organizational efforts to gain any traction at all. Successful activism is as much about logistics as it is fiery public speeches, and in the case of the U.S. prison strike, those logistics are far more complicated than the usual labor protests. Communication between prisons, or from the outside world into the prison system, is lossy, heavily surveilled, and participants are exposed to great risk with little chance of reward. Against these odds, coordinators on both sides of prison walls stitched together clever hacks for getting the word out: using smuggled cell phones, submerging planning messages in long passages of dull, dry texts on other subjects to evade censorship, and bubbling the prison strike story up to the news cycle so that it can be heard in the radio and television broadcasts accessible to prisoners. 
   

Waste: 

• How garbage moves (and accumulates) in the Great Lakes. The problem of plastic in oceans and lakes is well known, if not completely understood. For example, a recent study showing that marine worms are capable of breaking down plastic is not the miracle cure it appears to be. The worms can break down plastic bits in their gut, but that digestion yields smaller, more diffuse particles that can be ingested by tiny fish. 

Material Culture:  

• Over the centuries, art and artifacts have been looted, speciously purchased, and generally dislocated from their original contexts (both physical and cultural). With China's meteoric rise in economic fortunes, private and public collectors there are seeking out the country's aesthetic objects wherever they may be, and with a variety of methods. 

 

More next week.