3 (approx) interesting things, found (approx) this week. Also on Powered by Uniform Medium publication.

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3 (approx) interesting things, found (approx) this week. Also on Powered by Uniform Medium publication.

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This week’s update is over already. Until next time!

Findings

1. Amazon Scout (2019)

Amazon has announced a new project: Scout. But no, they didn’t buy our Smart Home counterspy prototype. The Amazon’s Scout is instead an autonomous delivery device, a self-driving cart to deliver packages door-to-door.

We’ve been hard at work developing a new, fully-electric delivery system – Amazon Scout – designed to safely get packages to customers using autonomous delivery devices. These devices were created by Amazon, are the size of a small cooler, and roll along sidewalks at a walking pace. Starting today, these devices will begin delivering packages to customers in a neighborhood in Snohomish County, Washington.

here

2. 100% Chair (2019)

Toronto studio Radical Norms has an interesting initial exploration of manufacturing and product design.

we are looking at the relationship between A.I. and a possible future world of artifacts and objects.

To do so we developed an alternative design process in which leftover offcuts taken from various production methods are used as components in a rotating interface. Looking at the new generative compositions, the A.I. predicts the emergence of possible ‘chairs’ ranging from 0-100%.

here

3. Inside Shenzhen’s race to outdo Silicon Valley (2019)

Fundamental behind the scene read from the place where our technological devices come from: Shenzhen, China.

On ideation an manufacturing

Most global consumers’ first contact with Shenzhen came through products like the selfie stick. Seemingly frivolous, relatively easy to manufacture, they were born of a process of product development and distribution called shanzhai (山寨). The term literally means “mountain hideout” (an apocryphal story traces its origins to factories in the hills of northern Hong Kong). the shanzhai method delivered “hardware memes”—gadgets quickly designed and built out of easily sourced and readily interchangeable parts.

On testing

Just as digital news outlets might test multiple headlines and tweets to see which one gets the most clicks, a shanzhai manufacturer would release 10 products with a mixture of copied and original designs, and go with whatever worked.

On authorship

“Chinese businessmen don’t care about competition in the way that you do,” Chen says. “The more people that are making the same product, the safer it is.” Indeed, if an idea is new and unproven, component suppliers will require payment up front. This tends to lead to design evolution rather than revolution—for example, going from an electric skateboard to an electric scooter. Then on the

Finally the article also talks about how an emerging network of design consultancies and software companies in Shenzhen is starting to transform it from a place limited to outsourced manufacturing and ingenuous product invention to a world-class technology hub, potentially able to compete, in their own terms, even with Silicon Valley.

here

(Also, after sharing the article above on Twitter I’ve been pointed to another shanzhai related one, also a great read: Hip-hop and shanzhai: when two remixing worlds collide.)

3 (approx) interesting things, found (approx) this week. Also on Powered by Uniform Medium publication.

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Some more news about our latest project Scout. We’ve just published a new in-depth post about it on Medium, going into details about how it works and how we’ve done it: Scout - A smart-home counterspy agent.

Findings

1. Project Alias (2019)

Very nice project by Bjørn Karmann (who also did the brilliant Objectifier) and Tore Knudsen. A parasite for voice assistants.

Alias is a teachable “parasite” that is designed to give users more control over their smart assistants, both when it comes to customisation and privacy. Through a simple app the user can train Alias to react on a custom wake-word/sound, and once trained, Alias can take control over your home assistant by activating it for you.

here

2. Wanna Nails (2018)

Try something on AR, there should be a category for these kind of apps on the App Store. This one it’s an app that allows you to try nail polish on. I’ve tried it and I’m impressed by how well it works.

here

3. The ‘Amen break’ is the ultimate design pattern (2019)

Absolute respect to this guy that used the Amen Break (the world’s most famous 6-sec drum loop - sampled for countless Hip-Hop, Drum & Bass, etc) as an examples to explain why Design Patterns are good.

I felt part of something.

One of the most common push backs on design system’s and design patterns is that they can be seen to limit a designer’s creativity or contain overly generic solutions to specific problems.

I would argue that much like using sampled music, they simply give you a starting point or set of constraints to work within. You can adapt or rearrange a pattern to suit your use case, you can make it a prominent part of your design or just let it sit in the background.

here

3 (approx) interesting things, found (approx) this week. Also on Powered by Uniform Medium publication.

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The new year has come and with it the time for some considerations and changes.

We’ve started this Weeknotes with two main purposes: to track and share news and interesting projects in the design & tech world (or at least the portion of it that has to do AI, IoT and emerging technologies) and to update our community and friends with what Creative Technology at Uniform is up to.

So far we’ve had some encouraging feedback. Uniform workmates seem to enjoy our findings (thank you!) and friends on social media liked our posts and reached out to us to discuss (thank you!).

But on the other hand, I often felt that what we talked about in the notes could have used some more time and reflection and be developed into a longer piece, something that regretfully I couldn’t managed to do: the commitment to a one post per week seemed to suck-up any other energy for writing.

So, while we work on our writing chops, the plan is to scale back on the notes. We’ll still chat about what we’ve been up to, if some particularly interesting thing happens, but otherwise from now on, we’ll limit to list what we found of interest in the week.

Happy new year!

And here’s to new year resolutions. We kick off the one above with already an exception!

The reason is that we’ve just published a new project: Scout. A smart device that visualises the conversations between your other smart devices and their servers, and if something doesn’t look right, enables you to ask the manufacturer for clarification via pushing a button (thanks GDPR).

The good thing about (good) smart object is how they seamlessly integrate and become part of your lives. But as you forget that they are “smart” you also forget that the data they collect is constantly shared beyond your home’s walls.

In this scenario, Scout is on one hand just another “ambient” device in your collection. Not more eye-catching than the Nest thermostat on your wall and not out of place among your book collection. But on the other hand, it is also the blabbermouth of the bunch, your counterspy agent in the otherwise unbalanced info-war of corporate surveillance.

Check the blog post, there’s also a beautiful video about the project shot by our own Beatriz Diogo - here.

Findings

1. CES, still putting chips on it (2019)

The trend is still going strong. Among others doubtfully smart products, an internet connected fishing rod and cat litter box.

here

2. Dawn (2018)

A bar where robot waiters are operated remotely from a paralyzed person’s home. Just a proof of concept (it stayed open just a couple of days), but very interesting.

here

3. ElliQ (2019)

A home assistant designed to keep elderly people active.

here

End of week notes and 3 (approx) interesting things, new or old, found (approx) this week. Also on Powered by Uniform Medium publication.

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Last week Mike Shorter and I have been in the stark & beautiful city of Rotterdam for giving our AI personas workshop and attending the Thingscon conference. I’ve been in a Thingscon conference before, the Berlin edition in 2015 and the atmosphere in Rotterdam felt similar to the one of 3 years ago in Berlin: a friendly and informal community, passionate about technology but strongly focussed on the impact that it has on people. But if in 2015, at the peak of excitement of the Internet of Things, “making” was the driving force of the event, now the most common keyword was instead “ethics”. Here are some of my highlights.

• Peter Bhir announced the launch of the Trustable Technology Mark, a new trustmark that aims to certify that they respect user rights - https://trustabletech.org/
• Ethics of emerging technology advocate and ex-Twitter designer Cennydd Bowles did a fantastic talk about ethics in tech, one of his interesting argument that here I’m paraphrasing is that “we should not make a business case for ethics, because if we make ethics subservient to business we imply that there could be a better business case to replace the ethics argument”.
• Researcher Holly Robbins and Thingscon co-founder Simon Höher hosted a great panel on ethics and one of the most interesting point touched during the discussion was about the need to set aside space and time for talking ethics together, rather than leaving the moral questions just to individuals alone.

Now some words about the AI personas workshop we gave. Many of the participants were from University. Both students and teachers. It was interesting to see how our AI personas resonated with them. We had for instance a good discussion about the relationship between the UX methodology of Personas and our personas. If in both the end goal is always to create useful, pleasing objects for people, the AI personas is in a way thing-centred instead than user-centred, focussing more on characterising the object instead of the people using it. In general, it was nice to hear that everybody found the framework especially helpful as an ideation tool.

We’ve also got a public shout-out from one of our participants, who cried: “AI personas” when the even host asked the audience about the workshops they liked the most. In the remote chance you’re reading this, many many thanks!

Findings

1. #Glitterstretchmark (2018)

Collage artist Sara Shakeel’s Instagram trend is Kintsugi for ageing female beauty.

(via Next Nature newsletter and their always spot-on radar)

here

2. Made In Machina (2018)

Very interesting project about AI, product design and manufacturing by Simone Rebaudengo and Sami Niemelä. A design brief is generated from a neural network trained with items available on Alibaba and then interpreted by Nordic designers.

here

3. 100% realistic artificially generated face portraits. (2018)

Must watch video. The results are unbelievable.

here