Weeknotes: design for resilience, MakeFest, fake stuff online, electricity
I've had Steven Jackson's paper on repair in my reading stack for months. I think I first came across it via Lee Vinsel's Maintainers graduate seminar syllabus. It situates maintenance within socio-technical studies, examining the broken world, the role of the fixer as distinct from the user or designer in innovation, and the risks of focussing on nostalgia or heroism as frames for maintenance.
A deeply thoughtful post (the content of a talk) by Courtney Johnston about museums and art galleries and controversy. What does it mean to be a safe space for unsafe ideas? (Via Mia Ridge, who is speaking at the Festival of Maintenance this year. Mia's retweet was actually of an Ed Rodley tweet, which intrigued me with the line: I love the way Courtney models how to “be” a professional and a leader in the 21st century. “Here are are my thoughts. Here are links to my inspirations so you can see how I got here and draw your own conclusions." I had no idea what Courtney's Webstock talk would be about, perhaps expecting something more, well, webbish, but was delighted by it anyway.)
Last Saturday was Liverpool MakeFest - the biggest maker festival in the UK. I was promoted this year to crew lead, and did my best to live up to the badge.
There's lots of photos of the makers and more on Twitter. It was particularly good to see how many Merseyside maker initiatives are striving to make a difference particularly in communities where skills, jobs and confidence are much needed. Examples included Urban Workbench (woodwork skills), Little Sandbox in Norris Green, and the Tech Styles group (learning computing whilst knitting and nattering). Neston High School are fundraising for a makerspace focussed on sustainability.
MakeFest 2019 included homebuilt electric Hacky Racers - there's a great video of Mark Mellors driving his with his usual style and panache. I briefly looked after the fire engine-styled racer so Mark could take a break, and it was a useful reminder of how complex niche cultural references are. The racer is called Rule Zero, which is a familiar concept for maker/makerspace types and an amusing pun. However, it's next to impossible to explain to small children, or their bemused parents, who blithely enquire about it! (One of the great features of Liverpool MakeFest is that it's held at the Central Library, which means many of the visiting public are there for the library, not for making, so it achieves incredible outreach.) You have to explain that places where makers hang out exist, and that they have rules which are numbered. That computer people sometimes number lists from zero, instead of one. That traditionally, in the UK at least, "rule zero" in such spaces has been "do not be on fire," and therefore this is a great name for a minature fire engine. By the end of this, people were usually regretting asking about the name :)
Mark deserves extra thanks for (quite possibly unintentionally) ending up volunteering muscle for furniture shifting during setup and tear down of the event. 🙏🏼
Electric vehicles are starting to become less alien to the general public, both at car level (not just pricey Teslas) and in bikes and scooters. Cambridge startup Flit is making a folding e-bike, for instance - they've come so far since Alex and Dave visited Makespace three years ago. It feels like that space is getting really interesting - lots of different products on show at Fully Charged Live recently. Hacky Racers were there too. I hope the mix of understandable and fun simple products, and accessible component pricing and tech, will start to attract more traditional petrolhead car modders over to electric, bringing down emissions and showing that electric mobility doesn't have to be expensive black box tech.
One festival down, and more on the horizon. Wuthering Bytes has announced the 2019 Festival Day programme - tickets on sale now for August 30th, and it's a great line up as ever, of science, music, software, tech and more. It's a really lovely event, friendly, authentic, fascinating, and a great excuse, if you needed one, to visit the Pennines and Hebden Bridge. It's followed by Open Source Hardware Camp.
Despite the profusion of reasonably affordable and good consumer 3D printers, and sites where digital design files can be shared online, and broken plastic bits in consumer items, it's still hard to do anything about the broken bits. Is 3D scanning technology the gap? Scott Jenson didn't find much help when he tweeted about a broken suitcase part - the suggestion to recreate the design might be the most plausible, but that requires a rare and hard to access skillset, too. An alternative would be lobbying for legislation to require manufacturers of such items to publish and openly license designs of spare parts, but that would appear to be a very slow and probably intractable fight in the current climate.
I don't follow Tim Hayward on Twitter for incisive commentary about the state of business today - I follow him to find out when there are new menu items at Fitzbillies cafe. But the business commentary is excellent (previously I learned about pallets this way). This week Tim tweeted a thread on business liabilities and insurance and the numerous layers between what seem like jobs to be done, and actual labour.
Bring on the robots.
Cassie Robinson has been gathering articles about gender, care and climate. If women are disproportionately involved in care, are they also disproportionately involved in sustainability? I particularly enjoyed this article by Tabitha Whiting about women as stewards (and women as 80% of those displaced by climate change). This reminded Cassie of the question she'd ask in 2016 at Doteveryone - what if, instead of more women in tech, we had more men in care?
Dr Lucy Rogers has been calling out various 'women in STEM' issues recently - nothing particularly notable, but she's been getting plenty of abuse for it. This week it was:
and a couple of weeks earlier, observing that outreach shouldn't be expected of all women in STEM:
Thanks Lucy for keeping pushing these important messages.
On to technology.
I was delighted that Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden's Nature paper is now out, about the 'fake news vaccine' game they've been developing - it's surprisingly effective! You can play the game online. The Trust&Technology Initiative has been able to help Jon and Sander with this work in a small way, and now has a Disinformation and Media Literacy special interest group.
How do you tell what's real online? Or who is real? It's already pretty difficult to tell for those of us who consider ourselves somewhat tech-savvy. This Buzzfeed piece dives into the murky world of fake people and online reputation management.
Several people I follow have linked to Maciej Cegłowski's essay on tech companies and privacy. I'm not sure there's a lot of new stuff here for those who have been thinking about what it means to live in the digital age, but the term 'ambient privacy' proposed here seems a useful one.
Another Cambridge-connected technology is Databox, now part of a new BBC experiment around personalised content and information which keeps all your information safe and in your home. Will be really interesting to see where BBC Box goes...
Alan Winfield writes up his recent talk on AI, ethics and energy. Maybe DeepMind would be rather less impressive if it had to match energy consumption of the human opponent in Go:
The team at Animorph, an unusual high tech co-op, got in touch to share their latest annual reflection. The usual early stage startup exploration is, to my mind, enhanced rather than limited for Animorph by the challenge of resourcing a co-operative. I'm interested in bonds at the moment; these are at such a different cost of capital to VC that they suggest or encourage alternative business models for tech too. (VC backed tech has to make returns at a high level, or growth at a high level, forcing a certain set of priorities onto a business. But a bond requires much lower returns, and so could be repaid with a very different revenue route in terms of userbase and payment scale.) The London Zebra community have compiled a directory of funders and support (contributions welcome - via links in the sheet) which follow the Zebra ethos.
I only recently heard about Superhuman, a new email platform; having a distant connection to the founder Rahul Vohra, I was mildly interested, although I think I handle my high volume email pretty well already, using Gmail's useful features. This week controversy hit Superhuman around their use of read reports - starting with this article, mostly interesting for how well it sets out the way tech culture develops and accretes. Superhuman since took action to address the concerns.
I got quite a lot of useful responses to my recent Twitter request for good project management tools (this, combined with wrangling the Cambridge office rental market, occupies much of my time these days). Rufus asked for recommendations of beautiful, elegant designs of text-heavy websites and so far elicited no responses. Finding some good examples here would be interesting - some content just doesn't need, or have, appropriate imagery, but at the same time isn't a PDF or ebook.
Secondly, attention to maintenance and repair may help to redirect our gaze from moments of production to moments of sustainability and the myriad forms of activity by which the shape, standing, and meaning of objects in the world is produced and sustained—a feature especially valuable in a field too often occupied with the shock of the new.Via Festival of Maintenance team-mate Naomi Turner, an article by Jesse Weaver on resilience as a key design imperative for the future - because we've forgotten to do this recently.
We don’t like to think about worst-case scenarios. Hell, we don’t even like to think about not-so-great-case scenarios. Instead, we design and build systems and products that work when conditions are just right. In design, this is sometimes referred to as the “happy path.” We design for the happy path first and then, if time allows, we go back later to look at other not-so-happy paths, or “edge cases.” But in a world of “move fast and break things,” time rarely allows for us to go back and look at the edge cases. If we do get time, we address those edge cases as an afterthought.My PhD ended up touching on similar topics - how network interfaces were well designed for when things went well, but error cases were not really thought through. I've always tried to consider systems, edge cases, threat models, but even with that mindset and a strong sense of responsible practice as an engineer it's easy to overlook things. (I never imagined our 2011 Evi phone app would have a different future life in the home as Alexa.) Jesse concludes:
Breaking away from fragile design requires a shift in thinking. It means spending more time considering less-than-optimal scenarios and putting in the effort to address them. If we do this, we’ll create more resilient, accessible, and ultimately more valuable design solutions. In a world where the only constant is change, we’re selling ourselves short by staying on the happy path.And then Dave Birch tweeted:
 |
| https://twitter.com/dgwbirch/status/1146881629752889346 |
A deeply thoughtful post (the content of a talk) by Courtney Johnston about museums and art galleries and controversy. What does it mean to be a safe space for unsafe ideas? (Via Mia Ridge, who is speaking at the Festival of Maintenance this year. Mia's retweet was actually of an Ed Rodley tweet, which intrigued me with the line: I love the way Courtney models how to “be” a professional and a leader in the 21st century. “Here are are my thoughts. Here are links to my inspirations so you can see how I got here and draw your own conclusions." I had no idea what Courtney's Webstock talk would be about, perhaps expecting something more, well, webbish, but was delighted by it anyway.)
Last Saturday was Liverpool MakeFest - the biggest maker festival in the UK. I was promoted this year to crew lead, and did my best to live up to the badge.
MakeFest 2019 included homebuilt electric Hacky Racers - there's a great video of Mark Mellors driving his with his usual style and panache. I briefly looked after the fire engine-styled racer so Mark could take a break, and it was a useful reminder of how complex niche cultural references are. The racer is called Rule Zero, which is a familiar concept for maker/makerspace types and an amusing pun. However, it's next to impossible to explain to small children, or their bemused parents, who blithely enquire about it! (One of the great features of Liverpool MakeFest is that it's held at the Central Library, which means many of the visiting public are there for the library, not for making, so it achieves incredible outreach.) You have to explain that places where makers hang out exist, and that they have rules which are numbered. That computer people sometimes number lists from zero, instead of one. That traditionally, in the UK at least, "rule zero" in such spaces has been "do not be on fire," and therefore this is a great name for a minature fire engine. By the end of this, people were usually regretting asking about the name :)
Mark deserves extra thanks for (quite possibly unintentionally) ending up volunteering muscle for furniture shifting during setup and tear down of the event. 🙏🏼
Electric vehicles are starting to become less alien to the general public, both at car level (not just pricey Teslas) and in bikes and scooters. Cambridge startup Flit is making a folding e-bike, for instance - they've come so far since Alex and Dave visited Makespace three years ago. It feels like that space is getting really interesting - lots of different products on show at Fully Charged Live recently. Hacky Racers were there too. I hope the mix of understandable and fun simple products, and accessible component pricing and tech, will start to attract more traditional petrolhead car modders over to electric, bringing down emissions and showing that electric mobility doesn't have to be expensive black box tech.
One festival down, and more on the horizon. Wuthering Bytes has announced the 2019 Festival Day programme - tickets on sale now for August 30th, and it's a great line up as ever, of science, music, software, tech and more. It's a really lovely event, friendly, authentic, fascinating, and a great excuse, if you needed one, to visit the Pennines and Hebden Bridge. It's followed by Open Source Hardware Camp.
Despite the profusion of reasonably affordable and good consumer 3D printers, and sites where digital design files can be shared online, and broken plastic bits in consumer items, it's still hard to do anything about the broken bits. Is 3D scanning technology the gap? Scott Jenson didn't find much help when he tweeted about a broken suitcase part - the suggestion to recreate the design might be the most plausible, but that requires a rare and hard to access skillset, too. An alternative would be lobbying for legislation to require manufacturers of such items to publish and openly license designs of spare parts, but that would appear to be a very slow and probably intractable fight in the current climate.
I don't follow Tim Hayward on Twitter for incisive commentary about the state of business today - I follow him to find out when there are new menu items at Fitzbillies cafe. But the business commentary is excellent (previously I learned about pallets this way). This week Tim tweeted a thread on business liabilities and insurance and the numerous layers between what seem like jobs to be done, and actual labour.
Bring on the robots.
 |
| http://catandgirl.com/oh-the-humanity/ |
Cassie Robinson has been gathering articles about gender, care and climate. If women are disproportionately involved in care, are they also disproportionately involved in sustainability? I particularly enjoyed this article by Tabitha Whiting about women as stewards (and women as 80% of those displaced by climate change). This reminded Cassie of the question she'd ask in 2016 at Doteveryone - what if, instead of more women in tech, we had more men in care?
Dr Lucy Rogers has been calling out various 'women in STEM' issues recently - nothing particularly notable, but she's been getting plenty of abuse for it. This week it was:
 |
| https://twitter.com/DrLucyRogers/status/1146086973897170945 |
 |
| https://twitter.com/DrLucyRogers/status/1140963685055250433 |
On to technology.
I was delighted that Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden's Nature paper is now out, about the 'fake news vaccine' game they've been developing - it's surprisingly effective! You can play the game online. The Trust&Technology Initiative has been able to help Jon and Sander with this work in a small way, and now has a Disinformation and Media Literacy special interest group.
How do you tell what's real online? Or who is real? It's already pretty difficult to tell for those of us who consider ourselves somewhat tech-savvy. This Buzzfeed piece dives into the murky world of fake people and online reputation management.
Several people I follow have linked to Maciej Cegłowski's essay on tech companies and privacy. I'm not sure there's a lot of new stuff here for those who have been thinking about what it means to live in the digital age, but the term 'ambient privacy' proposed here seems a useful one.
Seen in this light, the giant tech companies can make a credible claim to be the defenders of privacy, just like a dragon can truthfully boast that it is good at protecting its hoard of gold. Nobody spends more money securing user data, or does it more effectively, than Facebook and Google.A super interview with Martin Kleppmann, who is working on useful and meaningfully distributed systems in Cambridge. (There's a job going at the Computer Lab as Research Strategy Manager where you get to work with people like Martin and develop new collaborations and partnerships - a fascinating opportunity for someone!)
The question we need to ask is not whether our data is safe, but why there is suddenly so much of it that needs protecting. The problem with the dragon, after all, is not its stockpile stewardship, but its appetite.
This requires us to talk about a different kind of privacy, one that we haven’t needed to give a name to before. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered.
Another Cambridge-connected technology is Databox, now part of a new BBC experiment around personalised content and information which keeps all your information safe and in your home. Will be really interesting to see where BBC Box goes...
Alan Winfield writes up his recent talk on AI, ethics and energy. Maybe DeepMind would be rather less impressive if it had to match energy consumption of the human opponent in Go:
The first is about the energy cost of AI. In 2016 Go champion Lee Sedol was famously defeated by DeepMind's AlphaGo. It was a remarkable achievement for AI. But consider the energy cost. In a single two hour match Sedol burned around 170 kcals: roughly the amount of energy you would get from an egg sandwich. Or about 1 Watt – the power of an LED night light. In the same two hours the AlphaGo machine reportedly consumed 50,000 times more energy than Sedol. Equivalent to a 50 kW generator for industrial lighting. And that's not taking account of the energy used to train AlphaGo.Training complex machine learning systems takes a huge amount of energy too. For something like machine translation, we might feel this is worthwhile, and could at least be amortised over many users and uses. (Alan also covers the surpising scale of poorly paid white collar labour of tagging datasets, and the grim and growing labour of outsourced content moderation.)
The team at Animorph, an unusual high tech co-op, got in touch to share their latest annual reflection. The usual early stage startup exploration is, to my mind, enhanced rather than limited for Animorph by the challenge of resourcing a co-operative. I'm interested in bonds at the moment; these are at such a different cost of capital to VC that they suggest or encourage alternative business models for tech too. (VC backed tech has to make returns at a high level, or growth at a high level, forcing a certain set of priorities onto a business. But a bond requires much lower returns, and so could be repaid with a very different revenue route in terms of userbase and payment scale.) The London Zebra community have compiled a directory of funders and support (contributions welcome - via links in the sheet) which follow the Zebra ethos.
I only recently heard about Superhuman, a new email platform; having a distant connection to the founder Rahul Vohra, I was mildly interested, although I think I handle my high volume email pretty well already, using Gmail's useful features. This week controversy hit Superhuman around their use of read reports - starting with this article, mostly interesting for how well it sets out the way tech culture develops and accretes. Superhuman since took action to address the concerns.
I got quite a lot of useful responses to my recent Twitter request for good project management tools (this, combined with wrangling the Cambridge office rental market, occupies much of my time these days). Rufus asked for recommendations of beautiful, elegant designs of text-heavy websites and so far elicited no responses. Finding some good examples here would be interesting - some content just doesn't need, or have, appropriate imagery, but at the same time isn't a PDF or ebook.