Insights 10.29

Design:

• A poetic and thoughtful list of 250 things an architect should know, ranging from "the rate at which that carpet you specified off-gasses" to "how people pee."

• In our mass produced world, designers and engineers typically build averaged products that attempt to serve the full human range of needs, however, more tailor-made solutions can often serve us better. Customized goods built to suit an individual's body are a common example of how bespoke processes can make our lives more comfortable, but we can extend those practices to things like interfaces and alerts as well. This study of children responding to alarms (one with tone only, the other with their mother's recorded voice) suggests we are wired to respond strongly to personal stimuli, rather than generic prompts. 

Roadmapping the Future:  

• An odd project seeking to genetically engineer cats that will change color when in the presence of radiation, to warn our future descendants of the nuclear waste we are leaving behind. Many have attempted to design symbols, mythologies, and architectures that would prevent the careless wanderer of the future from radiological doom, and while these endeavors may verge on the absurd, they underscore the long, complex consequences of our scientific and technological efforts as a civilization that begin in optimism. 

Big Business: 

• Increased government spending is a significant contributor to recent economic growth in the U.S., according The Wall Street Journal. Military project spending is a big piece of that growth pie, which tends to benefit manufacturers, engineering firms, and technology providers over other sectors. Given that the U.S. has effectively been running intensive, continuous warfare operations around the globe since 2001, the flow of money to be made from the military-industrial complex is driven less by new geopolitical events, and more by presidential proclivities. 

• Tariffs set by the Trump administration are having big impacts on the valuations of large, consumer companies like iRobot. 

Waste:  

• Now that China has drastically cut the amount of low-quality recyclable materials they are accepting from abroad, other countries (primarily in Southeast Asia) are absorbing some of the demand. Despite new outlets popping up, net-exporter recycling programs from nations like the U.S. and France are struggling to make the economics work. Ultimately, anything fabricated ends up somewhere. Plastic production rates need to go down (through a combination of reduced demand and more circular systems) unless we are all willing to have the landfill begin at our own doorstep. Interestingly, Chinese entrepreneurs are buying or building material reprocessing plants in the U.S., to bring recycled material standards up to the level that China will accept, and profit in the process. 

Material Culture: 

• A fascinating and weirdly beautiful viral social media trend in China referred to as the "flaunt your wealth challenge" amounts to a photo or video of a fallen person, surrounded by the artifacts and objects of their day-to-day life. It's a sort of living, 21st century version of ancient ancestor practices of being buried or entombed with their earthly possessions. 

More next week. 

Insights 10.23

Design:

• Motorola is partnering with iFixit to provide repair tools for their products, a once common practice for companies, but a remarkably rare one today. 

• How to design for calmness.

Roadmapping the Future:  

• Fiction is a common tool for prototyping and prophesying possible futures. We linked to an article last week about the staleness of cyberpunk dystopias, so this reading list from Jay Owens of fresher future genres is well-timed.

Up In the Air: 

• Government officials in Chengdu, China, want to install an artificial moon in the form of a satellite.

Communication:  

• Two stories of what happens when modern day communication tools like social media or online gaming chat intersect with state power and violence: one about the (allegedly state-sponsored) twitter mobs that regularly went after Jamal Khashoggi, and another about how SWAT teams are duped into being agents of annoyance or even death by internet bullies. 

Archiving:  

• On populism, what architecture is deemed worthy of preservation, and how the great reconfiguring of retail leaves behind big empty shrines to 20th century mass consumption. 

• Contrary to popular conception of ancient Greek and Roman artifacts and architecture, their world was not built in Spartan white, but bold technicolor. Whether or not museums should present the full polychromatic versions remains in debate. 

Bias and Brains:   

• A study looking at behavior that is stereotypically coded as masculine or feminine suggests that feminine-coded behavior disadvantages entrepreneurs in business contexts, regardless of their gender. Such a study seems to echo other research identifying bias in the workplace, including the so-called 'sexuality pay gap' that indicates lower average pay for gay men compared to their heterosexual peers, and higher wages for lesbian women versus their straight counterparts. The Harvard Business Review article suggests that because much of professional life is performative anyway, one ought to shift their personal style to combat this bias, which feels like an absurd suggestion. Workers should be able to bring their full self to work, and paid proper money and attention based on performance, not gender, style, or some other aspect of personhood. 

 

More next week. 

Insights 10.16

Design:

• Pantone's reach has expanded to include metallic finishes.

• An excellent read on how PARC uses design to shape R&D efforts. 

Mapping Markets:  

• Our friend Chris Quintero at Bolt VC has looked at an awful lot of pitch decks for startups (mostly of the hardware variety), and has some things to say about what founders often get wrong about marketplaces, solution spaces, and how to build a high growth hardware businesses.

Building Things: 

• Behind the scenes at NASA: the process for painting the Mars rover. 

• Christopher Mims in The Wall Street Journal describes a nearly seamless system of production, warehousing, and distribution enabled by Industry 4.0 technologies like cheap sensors, sophisticated data analytics, and robots, that will make the movement of goods as easy as the movement of data. One example given in the article is of a container of strawberries plucked by a robot arm, then handed off to a drone for delivery to the end customer. In the 21st century we have witnessed an undeniable upheaval in the handling of logistics and distribution, but the actual production of goods still contains its own universe of friction-filled complexity. Compare the strawberry example to an iPhone: in the case of the strawberry, the assembly (and to some extent, the sourcing, refining, and movement of raw materials) is taken care of, more or less, by nature. In the case of the iPhone, blocks of aluminum (ore harvested, refined, packaged and shipped) must be milled with specific cutting tools (manufactured, packaged, shipped), combined with electronics and battery technologies, all assembled by a mix of human and machine labor. Those inputs must all converge at the right place, at the right time, at the right price. The supply chain for 'manufacturing' fruit (and inputs) are quite localized, whereas the supply chains for complex goods are long, convoluted, and always at risk of disruption from issues of labor, natural disaster, trade policies, and a thousand other variables. The production side of the equation for perfectly balancing demand and fulfillment is loaded with far more stubborn challenges than the vision of a tidy bin of strawberries couriered by drone presents. Atoms, ultimately, are not bits: the proverbial gears in the machinery of physical systems face an ever-present threat of the dirt, dust, and muck of our dirty world seizing them up. 

Automatons:  

• Veo Robotics is working to equip high-payload industrial robots with the kinds of safety measures that turn them from caged beasts into robotic co-workers. The technology is well-timed: trailblazing 'co-bot' company Rethink Robotics has just shut down, leaving a gap for human-friendly robots, while automation spending sprees in China, Europe, and the U.S. have driven down the cost of powerful robotic arms. Veo's retrofit approach combining the beyond-human power and precision of industrial robots with the safety of Rethink's co-bots is likely to find a wide range of useful applications, by bypassing the need for extensive retooling on the part of the manufacturer.

Just A Game:  

• On the staleness of cyberpunk tropes (both aesthetic and conceptual), and how many of the elements that started as dystopian warning in fiction have grown into banal (but still dangerous) aspects of daily life. 

 

More next week.