This week: Creative algorithms, walking with satellites, flat-pack robots and the link between the sp
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June 20 · Issue #16 · View online
A weekly dispatch on our evolving relationship with technology.
Topics: Near-future design, autonomous everything, design ethics, machine learning and the human impact of embedding technology into everyday life.
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This week: Creative algorithms, walking with satellites, flat-pack robots and the link between the space shuttle and a horse’s rear end.
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Steph is also in London next Monday for just a few days, and with a pretty full schedule but may be able to fit in a short chat if anyone’s interested. Ping us on Twitter if you’d fancy meeting up!
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0.0 The most fun things we’ve seen all week:
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I can totally see kids in 2025 trading green-screen AR filters.
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“Alongside the internet, the GPS system is perhaps one of our most ambitious contemporary technological projects…it is almost completely ubiquitous, as it covers most of the outdoor world, including places where there is no electricity, internet or mobile phone coverage.”
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“The world is changing and so are our lives at home. More and more people move to cities and live in smaller spaces with fewer rooms. New household structures have an impact too…More of us live alone, lodge or live together with roommates and many children live in single-parent homes. We also travel abroad more than ever…Still, for many, the longest journey is the one to the local market. The living room is still dedicated for special occasions only, and the phone is just a tool to make a phone call”
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4.0 Equally impressive…and a bit hard to explain (the videos are well worth it). This algorithm evaluates human sketches from a purely stylistic perspective, then applies the aggregate style to a completely new object.
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“With a genetic algorithm, instead of imagining a design solution, the designer develops a fitness criteria and coaxes the algorithm towards a final design”.
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6.0 Terrapattern is a visual search engine for satellite imagery that lets you query geographic patterns and features within a given area. Lots of creative ways to use something like this, including ad-hoc surveys of building types, number of green spaces, number of solar panels etc. that you can then use to extrapolate other types of data. (See Facebook’s initiative to create population maps by counting buildings and extrapolating probable number of residents).
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All the cul de sacs in Pittsburgh :)
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9.0 The U.S. office of Homeland Security is looking for companies to design canine wearables. The goal is to improve the health and/or performance of their Border Protection dogs.
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4.0 Meet Dtto, a transformable snake-like robot designed to be flexible and self-reconfigurable. (The videos are quite impressive!)
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From the past: From last week’s Decentralised Web Summit, a wonderful story about the relationship between ancient Roman roads, a horse’s back-end, and the space shuttle. “When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad from the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses’ behinds. So a major design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was originally determined by the width of a horse’s ass.”
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From the future: NASA is working on an electric airplane (for some reason, electric cars seem completely normal, but this sounds totally creepy) and a Canadian company is thinking of reviving dirigibles for the far north where some communities are now far harder to reach due to melting ice roads. “…dirigibles do not need an airport to unload. One lighter-than-air model in development by LTA Aérostructures of Montreal would lower up to 70 tonnes of cargo to the ground, requiring only a mooring mast.”
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Our best wishes for a productive week. If you enjoy this letter, please tell your friends; if you don’t, please unsubscribe. As always, thanks for reading!
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