Essential Design Blog Insight & Inspiration • May 2021

Our innovation, design and development teams track trends across the industries in which we work. Here are some stories you might find as interesting as we did.Subscribe Here.   “The technology is developing very rapidly, possibly exponentially. But people are linear. When linear people are faced with exponential change, they’re not going to be able to adapt to that very easily.” (Daniel Kahneman in The Guardian) Technology • I, Robot Our evolving relationship with technology. Daniel Kahneman: ‘clearly AI Is Going to Win. How People Are Going to Adjust Is a Fascinating Problem’ | The Guardian How Pixar Uses Hyper-Colors to Hack Your Brain | Wired Why More Young People Are Ditching Their Smartphones | Huck The NYPD Retires “digidog” Robot After Public Backlash | Ars Technica 25 Edits That Define the Modern Internet Video and Create the Vocabulary for an Absurd, Ingenious Art Form | Vulture The Anxiety of Influencers | Harper's Magazine   “Wasteless displays two prices, one for the product with a closer expiration date and one for the product with a further out expiration date to incentivizes customers to reduce waste.” (Green Biz) Sustainability: A Convenient Truth Sustainability is also good for business. The New Dynamic Duo: Pricing and Food Waste | Green Biz The New Menu at Eleven Madison Park Will Be Meatless | The New York Times Pandora Ditching Mined Diamonds for Lab-grown Ones | WashPo Used Furniture Is About to Become a $16.6 Billion Business. Even Ikea Is Getting in on It | Fast Company  Financial Giants Keep Boosting Their Sustainable Investments | Triple Pundit Troy's Gabrielle Boyle: for Global Companies, Sustainability Is Just Good Business | Money Week “Chrysler launched the Airflow in 1934 with high hopes that its aerodynamic body and numerous innovations would be the face of the future. Instead, it proved to be a face that only its fathers could love, even if many of its ideas were copied.” (Hagerty) History • Back to the Future Design of the past can help us innovate today. 1934 Chrysler Airflow: Car of the Future That Arrived a Little Too Early | Hagerty How Florence Nightingale Used Data Viz to Save Lives | Fast Company How Big Tech Weaponised Design Patents | The Guardian What Caused the Roaring '20s? Probably Not a Pandemic End | Smithsonian The Isolator: a 1925 Helmet Designed to Eliminate Distractions & Increase Productivity (Created by SciFi Pioneer Hugo Gernsback) | Open Culture How '70s Radical Design Group Shaped the New Domestic Landscape | L'Officiel   “Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.” (Wired) Ideas • A Beautiful Mind Brilliant tales of ingenuity, discovery, and experimentation. They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War | Wired The Robot Surgeon Will See You Now | The New York Times People Emerge From Cave After 40-Day 'Deep Time' Experiment | Gizmodo People Are Losing Their Taste and Smell to Covid-19. Now There’s a Cookbook to Help | WashPo 12 Masterpieces That Show the Oneness of Mathematics and Design | Medium Hologram Experts Can Now Create Real-life Images That Move in the Air | Phys.org “I was surprised, however, to find the Times uses the very same dark pattern it derides to prevent its own subscribers from canceling.” (OneZero) Ethics | Risky Business The costs of neglecting ethics, risk, and inclusion in design. The New York Times Derides the Very Dark Patterns It Uses | OneZero Inside an International Tech-Support Scam | AARP A $4 Bit of Plastic Could Have Saved Peloton Millions | Wired Seems Like Everyone Hates Instagram for Kids | Vox Blind People, Advocates Slam Company Claiming to Make Websites ADA Compliant | NBC News Signal Messenger Takes Aim at Instagram’s ‘hazy’ User Data Policies With SUPER-SPECIFIC Ad Campaign, Gets Its Ad Account Blocked | Fortune   “Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin emphasized the need to depart from previous ways of waging war and focus on new, technology-driven tools and strategies.” (FedScoop) Defense • Starship Troopers The military is prioritizing innovation. Pentagon Leaders Emphasize Role of Emerging Technologies in Battle | FedScoop Space Force's Vision Doc Is a Like a Pitch Deck for a 1995 Dotcom Startup | Vice The Army’s Next Big Emerging Tech Experiment | American Military News The Army is Planning Open-architecture Guidelines for Contracts | FedScoop The US Navy’s Bio-preparedness Innovation Window Remains Open Through Cruise Lines | Defense News   Interested in more? Sign up for our bi-monthly newsletter.