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Everything New is Old Again

4/29/2018

With just forty-four years on the atomic clock to go until 2062—the apex of the Jetsonian Era—it is remarkable how quickly real world fact has caught up to cartoon fiction. Who can remember before there were flat screen TVs, smart phones and talking alarm clocks? Now Amazon is reportedly developing a house robot, which means Rosie's great great great great grandbot could be rolling into homes—perhaps your home—within a few years.

Yet for all the tech gee whiz, the Jetsonsonian future is also infused with circa 1962 social bias: everybody is white and for women the options begin with "boy-crazy" and end with home-maker. In fact, Jane Jetson went directly from boy-crazy to home-maker. According to character bios posted on Wikipedia, she is 33 while daughter Judy is 16. That means Jane was a teen-age mom and George, seven years her senior, was playing with fire.

Cultural diversity and equal rights were simply not on the radar when the show premiered, at least not in prime time. However, within a matter of months both The March on Washington so central to the Civil Rights movement, and the release of Betty Friedan's bombshell book "The Feminist Mistique," would begin to change everything.

Despite the Jetsons' eerily prescient track record on the gadget front, the future is always ours to make (just ask Jaron Lanier). We can do better.

Let's do better.

* And let's not waste time. George is 40 in 2062, which means he was born in 2022, which means we are just four years away from baby Jetson. Ok, fictitious baby Jetson. Still, how weird is that? The future is scary close.

"Design is Hope Made Visible"

4/28/2018

I first saw / heard / experienced designer Brian Collins about a year ago when he took the stage at a business conference at Northwestern University. His peacock blue blazer was a tip-off. In a room full of the reasoned and reasonable outfitted in muted business-casual attire, Collins stood out as a full-palette challenge. He was the only one to coordinate with the conference logo and indeed the stage lighting. Before he had said a word his point was made: The answer is logic and...

Even the smartest of the smart cannot spreadsheet their way to success or chart a straight path to the future. Data points without context and understanding only get you so far. To navigate to the next takes curiosity, daring, an appreciation of the past, boatloads of imagination and all of our senses—the ones we know about and others operating on the periphery of awareness.

That's what good designers bring to the table whether, as with Collins, they work with commercial brands and exhibit design (the Muppets fergoshsakes!), or in architecture, product development or urban planning. Taken together the videos provide a sort of mini-masterclass on the disciplined alchemy of the design process and also on how design can make a tangible difference—not just in terms of corporate bottom lines but in our experience of the world at large.

"You can look at your life as being the result of the past or as a cause of the future," notes Collins sitting in the time capsule of the book-and-stuff-filled library at the heart of his Greenwich Village studio. The past isn't prologue. It's raw material.

Related:
• COLLINS studio
• Design Matters interview with Debbie Millman
• Hat Tip to Rob Wolcott and 3 Billion Seconds.

The Delight and Dismay of "WTF?"

4/28/2018

Tim O'Reilly of the eponymous O'Reilly Media company is known for his work as a pioneering tech publisher (starting with the "animal" series of coding books and evolving into Safari, a digital learning platform) and also as the driving force behind a remarkable series of tech conferences.

His background, however, isn't in computer science, but in Greek and Latin classic literature, which is at once surprising and makes perfect sense. A deep knowledge of history and an understanding of philosophy have sharpened his ability to consistently spot significant trends (open source, Web 2.0, augmented intelligence) and also the insight to consider their implications .

"Technology is our superpower...Inequality is our kryptonite," he notes. O'Reilly's latest book "What's the Future and Why It is Up to Us" is basically a call to action."If there is a (hostile AI), then we already training it. We are already teaching it," he observes.

We have to do better. We can do better, he insists. In the age of fake news and twitter-bots, I sure hope so. (Related: WTF? Economy website)

Play and the Path Forward

4/28/2018

The first time I walked into the Media Lab building at MIT I was filled with as sense of awe, but also an unexpected feeling of somehow coming home. I sat for quite a long while in an interior courtyard on the second floor gazing up at the glass windows of labs. Many of the them were two stories, stacked together like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle: The first floor of one lab connecting via spiral staircase to the second floor of another. The architecture encouraged peripheral vision—my favorite! Then some students rolled out a samovar for afternoon tea with a side of junk food and I seriously considered missing my flight home to begin a new life as a Media Lab stowaway.

Media Lab was founded in the 1980s as a place for the university's misfits to pursue the kinds of ideas and projects that simply couldn't be shoe-horned into departmental missions. With some key funding by Steve Jobs when he was between jobs, the Lab gained a foothold and went on to become a legend. Perhaps even more remarkable is that it has managed to maintain a perch on the cutting edge. Famously "anti-disciplinary," it is also in a sense anti-institutional. Just when you think you know what Media Lab does, it goes and does something else.

Media Lab "looks for spaces between and beyond disciplines," explains Joi Ito, the director for the last half dozen years. "Can we fund those crazy ideas that in retrospect seem obvious?"

The short answer is Yes! For details, watch the video. (Related: Joi Ito's book, co-authored with Jeff Howe, "Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future")

New Food, Next food

4/25/2018

Mike Lee is a food futurist who spends his days thinking about the grocery store of tomorrow. It is not just about shopping (in-store, online, delivered by driver, drone or bot), but also what's on the shelves. To make it more real, he created a trade show-ready, pop-up store—with companion website—called The Future Market to demo products, displays and test customer experience. Customers begin by answering a series of questions (e.g, "Are you looking for products that reduce global warming or reduce weight?") to prep an algorithm to pre-select choices. "The way to navigate a wealth of information is through customization," says Lee. Or, if you're like me and you have come to loathe the many incremental options in the orange juice aisle, you simply turn on blinders and never ever consider anything but what you once discovered as good. Too much choice = no choice.

Of course, Trader Joe's has figured a work-around. They have seen me coming and know I will try almost anything with the word "medley" on the package. I like my food musical and the choice in literally contained in whatever it is. Yes, please!

Lee's genius is in prototyping products just this side of plausible that deftly braid the values of "people, profit and planet." For example, "Aqua Cull: Killer Fish Sticks" made from invasive species, "Trim Snack" made from food scraps and "Alga Marine" seaweed pasta. My favorite may be "Three Sisters Polenta," which supports and raises awareness about polyculture agriculture. It's made from the "three sisters": corn, squash and beans. (Big hat tip to NEO.Life - fabulous blog / newsletter.)

Farms in the City

4/25/2018

Spring, especially this year, can take forever to arrive. Then one day the birds are singing, the air is soft, green is everywhere and all those miracle-fiber winter coats, sweaters and boots crammed into my closets and drawers look silly. The winter of last week is as hard to imagine as the mile-high Pleistocene ice sheet that flattened the landscape for millennia, finally melting 10,000 years ago leaving behind a lacework of rivers and Great Lakes-size puddles. It also created some of the most fertile soils to be found anywhere.

The legacy of this black gold has proved a saving grace for Detroit, a city long in decline. The combination of cheap land, abandoned buildings and a young population with nothing to lose has sparked the reinvention of a city neighborhood as an "agrihood." The largely volunteer Michigan Urban Farming Initiative has in a few short years transformed a down-at-the-heels neighborhood into resilient community centered around a two-acre working farm. The biggest challenge will be making sure that the people who made the magic happen can afford to stay. (Read more here.)

Closer to home, the Peterson Garden Project (PGP) is gearing up for another season in Chicago. Spearheaded by the well-named LaManda Joy, PGP is a collection of community gardens inspired by and modeled after the Victory Gardens of WWII. My Aunt Sue (Suzie!) had a Victory Garden—one of 14,000 children's gardens in the city. I can picture my grandmother helping her baby girl plant vegetables on a fine spring day—a day, perhaps, just like today.

Because Everything is made of Something

4/24/2018

A few years ago I came across a book called Stuff Matters by British materials scientist Mark Miodownik. It quickly became a favorite and also a default present: If you were on my birthday / holiday gift list that year, that's what you got. It went on to win several awards, so I was far from alone in being mesmerized by Miodownik's storytelling. Now he's starring in BBC documentaries. "Super Elements" are magical. Neodymium. Rhenium. Lithium. Helium. Yumium. Ok, I made up the last one. But they really are all rather delicious, if not in culinary sense than in the fact that we live on a planet that has them. How cool is that?

Graphene: the 2D Difference

4/24/2018

Graphene makes material scientists weak in the knees. If it's not the answer to everything, it's the answer to almost everything. Graphene's hexagonal honeycomb structure is elegantly sturdy, but the magic is in its astonishing one-atom thickness (thinness?). At two atoms, it becomes graphite--the "lead" that actually isn't lead in pencils. The latest "make it better with graphene!" story involves concrete and the implications for the climate are significant. Graphenated concrete is "twice as strong and four times more water-resistant than existing concretes." Blimey! That means less is needed and it will do a better job., too. Given that 6% of global CO2 emissions are from cement production—the main ingredient in concrete—this is a very big deal.

More good graphene news: Researchers at MIT have come up with an industrial-scale production process for graphene membranes that can be used for desalinization and other processes that require high-quality filters.

The Trashbot of all Trashbots: The One & Only WALL-E!

4/21/2018

Pixar's classic WALL-E is a weird movie. Earth has become so polluted that the human population abandoned the planet for a centuries-long space cruise while an army of trashbots clean up the mess they left behind. How this ever got past a pitch is anyone's guess, but the bots (and a cockroach) have undeniable charm. WALL-E, the last of his kind, is resourceful, good-natured, curious, industrious, considerate and thoughtful. Meanwhile, the humans are fat, lazy and none-too-bright. The odds that they will make it as farmers upon their return—a move predicated on the germination of a single plant—are rather slim. Still, as long as there's a bot with that loves toe-tapping show tunes (Hello Dolly's Put on your Sunday Clothes), there's hope, right?

Splashdown!

4/21/2018

What goes up, come down. If it's a satellite or a spaceship then you hope it comes down in the South Pacific in a place as far away from inhabited land as possible. Someday someone (some alien?) is going to across all the space junk currently sitting at the bottom of the sea—only by then it will be embedded in a rock atop a mountain—and wonder what the heck happened here. It's a PhD thesis in the making. Fascinating read via How Stuff Works.

The Great Plastic Clean up

4/21/2018

"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency" --Daniel Burnham, "The Plan of Chicago" (1909)

Although separated by a century and continent, Burnham would have applauded Boyan Slat's efforts to clean up the world's oceans—a project Slat began when was just 16-years old and living in the Netherlands. Now in his mid-twenties and with millions of dollars in funding, Slat's big plan is about to be put to the test. This summer a two-mile boom / filter designed to clean up "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" (the largest of five garbage patches swirling aound the world's oceans) will be towed into place by Slat's nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup.

There is so much plastic in the sea that recently a dead whale washed up with 64 pounds of the stuff in its stomach.

Even if successful, there is second problem with recycling the plastic, which comes from many different sources. Some of the plastic contains harmful chemicals, but those bits are impossible to sort out. However, a recent, serendipitous discovery of a super-enzyme capable of dissolving plastic into its component petroleum parts may provide a solution. Not only would all the existing plastic be recyclable, but there would also be no need to use oil to create new plastic. Win-win!

The Roombas of the Water

4/21/2018

There is a certain awe-inspiring doggedness to these aquatic Roomba-style waterway vacuum cleaners. The video on the top is from Dutch company called RanMarine, which has field-testing WasteSharks all over the world. The founder Richard Hardiman made a prototype in his garage after seeing a couple of fisherman trying to clean up an area around their boat with a pool net. His tinkering has morphed into a business and a calling. Rán, btw, is a Norse sea goddess: "Famously independent and impetuous, Rán catches sailors who fall overboard in her magical net (a gift from Loki, the god of mischief) in return for whatever gold they are carrying."

The Trash Robot in the second video will be patrolling the Chicago River this summer. It is the latest project from Urban Rivers, an intrepid grassroots organization focused on low-cost, innovative, crowdfunded solutions. Not only did Trash Robot beat its $5000 funding goal on Kickstarter (shout out to Makerbiz member Nick Wesley!), but the campaign offered a unique reward to backers: the chance to operate the bot remotely—a real world riff on Pac-Man. I can't wait to see this is action!

Trashbots

4/21/2018

Recently I was asked to be part of a workshop at IIT looking at the food manufacturing industry in Chicago. One the exercises involved choosing two technologies and imagining their combined impact across the food system (growing, packaging, disposal, etc.). The technologies were listed on two decks of cards, each a different color, which gave the whole thing a sort of Tarot-meets-Board-Game feel. My group chose "Open Source Design" and "Robots" (hat tip to Chris Bue whose admiration of the Roomba tribe runs deep). Very quickly we zoomed in on disposal as a sector full of opportunity riffed on the city's potential to become a trashbot hub. That got me curious... Sure enough, trashbots are a thing! It is hard to get a sense of just how big, but according to a new industry report, the sector globally is expected to enjoy a robust compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 20% by 2024. There is a gold mine in garbage!

I have a weakness for trade shows and Waste Expo is amazing. I went to one several years ago at McCormick Place and I hope it returns here for 2019 (I would really like to keep my streak of never having been to Las Vegas going as long as possible...).The technologies are amazing and the opportunities are vast. However, it is an industry dominated—at the management level—by white men. Just look at the promo video. There is no good reason for this.

There are a couple of ways this can be fixed. The first is more aggressive outreach by the industry (e.g., free passes for students). The second is for people simply to make the decision to go and learn. Many of these kinds of conferences offer free-with-registration access to the trade show floor. Vendors are generally very friendly and it's a good way to research job prospects. It is a one-stop shop for trade magazines, too. If you live in a city with a convention center, find out what's coming to town and whether there might be a way you for you to attend. Whenever I walk into a big show at McCormick Place I alway sigh and think, "They did this all for me?"

The Garbage Defense

4/21/2018

Fight garbage with garbage? This could be genius...

"If bots can be used to spread propaganda, bots can also be used to create an immune system-like response to isolate and envelop these abusive sites while they starve for resources. If bots can be used to spread disinformation, they can also be used to create a crowd within which to hide and stay anonymous.

"Most importantly, it’s much harder for the next Cambridge Analytica to abuse data that’s riddled with synthetic but plausible garbage." — Chad Loder CEO, habitu8

Of course, all that fakery comes at an energy cost as servers serve up every greater quantities of faux fluff. Also, as the lines between what's real and what's not blur, it's possible to create an auto-immune response that makes it harder than ever for the truth to shine through. (via The Register)

How Many Robots Does it Take to Take Apart a Phone?

4/21/2018

In this age of tariff tiffs and looming trade wars, the business case for recycling electronics has become that much more compelling. It is cheaper to reuse materials such as aluminum, tin and rare earth metals if the quality can be maintained. Daisy, Apple's latest dis-assembly bot, is designed to do just that. However, given Daisy can take apart only 200 iPhones per hour, while more than 30,000 are sold in that time, it's going to take an immense field of Daisies to make a dent. Still ,it is a promising move in right direction: circular. Everything old can become new again when waste becomes resource.

Spring via Wren

4/20/2018

Let's take a moment and welcome this year's much-better-late-than-never Spring. I was walking north on Wacker Drive yesterday afternoon when I spotted the little guy in the photo. Perhaps he flew in for an audition at the Lyric Opera, which is just up the street (have you heard him sing?), or maybe he'e en route to (literally) greener pastures. Either way, Winter is no match for this tiny powerhouse. Spring it on, then!

Energiesprong: The mother of all Retrofits...@ Scale

4/19/2018

Last night I was at a Passive House meetup in Chicago where among many other things, I learned about Energisprong. (For those new to Passive House, it is a method—and a philosophy—for designing super efficient buildings.) Energiesprong, which came out of the Netherlands (hence the quirky-fun word), is extreme-retrofitting. As the slightly Monty Python/Terry Gilliam-ish animation above explains, older homes get new, better-insulated facades, solar roofs and system upgrades. The kicker is that the work is completed in about a week. Energiesprong is catching on in Europe. Here in the US, Rocky Mountain Institute's REALIZE initiative is working out the logistics to make this practical at scale.

File Under: How Did We Miss this?

4/19/2018

Given all the gobsmacking advances in bestiary robots (fish, snakes, bees, bugs, dogs...), and ever-cleverer AI (e.g, Who / what wrote that poem?!), perhaps the time has come for V.2 of Alan Turing's famous test. Merely matching—or exceeding—human intelligence doesn't seem like much of a challenge anymore. On the other hand, hacking bird-of-paradise intelligence would take things to a whole new alien-psychedelic level. Famous for the males' extravagant courtship displays, you would think scientists would know all there is to know about these flashy dancers. It's not like they're hiding, which makes the identification of a new species in Indonesia all that more amazing. Look at this fellow go! Now write the algorithm... (via National Geographic)

Finding Nemo, Dori & All their Friends...with a Robot Fish

4/17/2018

Of all the mechanical critters in the ever-expanding robot bestiary, I think the fish could be my favorite (the headless dog is most definitely my least favorite). The video is certainly much more soothing to watch than the typical tech fare, shot among the coral reefs of Fiji. While the researchers were focused on testing out the fish itself, I'd like to see some of what the fish saw. I guess that's the next trip. Another suggestion: paint the fish like a tropical fish! If the idea is to send schools of these things into the deep as unobtrusive observers, they need to blend in!

What's Red and slithers and looks Like a snake?

4/17/2018

Last year at the Automate conference at Chicago's McCormick Place, it was clear that the future, at least in terms of robots, was soft and bendy. Multi-jointed robotic arms have hands with multi-jointed fingers. Now researchers at Harvard have figured out how to make artificial skin designed to slither and made a robo-snake. Robo-eek!

File under Things I wouldn't Have Thought of...

4/17/2018

Remember when origami was for making pretty paper swans? The mash-up of drone, extendable origami arm, a gripper and a camera is truly a mythical beast of a maker's dream. While it may not be lovely, it is impressive. The folding arm is some darn clever engineering. Related article on The Verge.

awwww... Such a Cute Little Self-Forming Bot!

4/17/2018

If it weren't so darn adorable, I'd probably reach for a shoe to squash it. That's a lot of "Wow!" in a small package.

Robobees Rising!

4/17/2018

While actual bees are plotzing all over the planet from pesticides, mites and disease, the buzz has shifted to itty bitty electronic drones. Interest is coming from all quarters. Retailer Walmart just took out a patent on a drone bee, which kind of makes sense when you consider that more than half its profits come from groceries and much of the food supply is tied into pollination. Artificial bees as the fix for our collective failure to save the real ones? There's not a lot of joy in that. Then there are NASA's "Marsbees," swarms of which could soon be heading to the red planet. Imagine the sound of thousands of tiny plastic wing beats at dawn... (Related: "Supply chains at risk as pollinators die out" )

Puffins are even Better than You thought...

4/16/2018

Puffin beaks glow in the dark. We know that because a scientist having a "'troubling' time in the lab" one day decided to shine a UV light on a puffin carcass in the dark. Ok, it wasn't an entirely random, whimsical, weird thing to do. It turns out there are other birds with fluorescent beaks. Now the question is whether live puffins are as brilliantly wired as dead ones. Field trip! (via CBC)

Lighting by Watercress...

4/16/2018

Researchers at MIT infused plants with the enzyme that makes fireflies glow, making them glow, too. It's neat, but why do it? "Imagine that instead of switching on a lamp when it gets dark, you could read by the light of a glowing plant on your desk." Seriously? If the point is grid-independent lighting, then a solar-charged lamp does the job better and without the eerie green glow. "This technology could also be used...to transform trees into self-powered streetlights, the researchers say." What happens in winter? For that matter what happens when insects nibble the leaves? Will they glow, too? No doubt there is a useful future for nanobionic technology, but what that may be in unclear in the faerie light dazzle.

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