I will probably say this every time I attend SXSW, but this year’s SXSW programming seemed a lot more ambitious than in previous years. It seemed there were a lot more attendees this year, too many sessions in a specific track, and less space available (a lot of the hotel venues that hosted sessions in the past weren’t available this year). However, this year they offered multiple encore presentations for some of the more popular sessions to anyone that missed out on it the first time, which is actually a very good idea because I suffer from so much FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) so that helped alleviate those feelings.
I felt VR and AI were the main themes this year, with almost every trade show booth showcasing some form of VR headset or AI robotics, whereas in the past, I’ve seen 3D printing and makerbots as a main theme. A major differentiation I’ve observed this year is the amount of topics around diversity and inclusion, which I feel is very timely and necessary for a post-2016 nation. Perhaps I intrinsically wanted to attend those panels and sessions, but I truly think that inclusion is at the top of everyone’s minds, and we collectively, genuinely want to assert love and drive change for the better in this nation, which was refreshing to witness and be a part of.
Anyway, I spent some time consolidating and writing up my notes from the sessions I attended with the intention of sharing out the learnings with my team, digesting the things I’ve learned and how I can apply them to everyday life, document all the inspiration so we can refer to notes later, and then contemplate and assess what I am doing with my life…
Evernote took a bunch of really good notes on sessions around the workplace track.
My former employer, Fjord, which I still have so much love and respect for, is now part of Accenture Interactive, and they had a huge presence in Austin this year, and they’ve been writing up a lot around SXSW and current/future trends.
More from Fjord: Fjord Trends 2017
Fjord: People and Technology
Here are my notes!
Augmented Reality and Urban Revitalization
Mona Lalwani, Engadget
John Hanke, Niantic Inc
Sam Gill, Knight Foundation
- We want to promote “adventures on foot” by reimagining civic commons, libraries, parks, connect them, revitalize them. Get outside, get exercise!
- Real world events are in play now. People are starving for physical meetups instead of just meeting people digitally. People are hungry to engage real life people.
- People have been pooling together money to get to Russia or the South Pole to catch Pokemon. There has been a meet up of up to 10,000 people!
- Summer camps: libraries, museums, zoos, botanical gardens are luring kids inside with lures and events.
- Surprise outcome: people started doing good things together (i.e. people are feeding starving children, starting blood drives, help with missions trips)
- Cities are places that people can come together. Individuals can feel like they can do something. Technology is the accelerant for desire.
- Empty public spaces help us rethink what we can do and offer
- Democratizing places for inclusion: a device and connectivity are needed. People are excluded if they don’t have that. Something to think about: How can we get devices and technology available to people? Forces us to think about different neighborhoods. Temporary popup stores? Inward look at urban cores. - Tech shift: Yelp told me immediately about things that go on this weekend. How to use tech to get out of your house, out of your car.
- How can we have multiple narratives?
Humans, Machines, and the Future of Industrial Design
#TheNewID
Jason Robinson, IDEO
Pip Mothersill, MIT Media Lab
This was a very academic session that requires some digesting and critical thinking upon leaving the session, but I really enjoy these types of presentations! Although I work on a computer everyday, I rarely stop to think about how machines can be “intelligent collaborators in our creative process.” It was very interesting and thought-provoking to see a design language around what makes something aesthetically pleasing or ugly.
Notes:
- Industrial design connects logic and emotion.
- Machines are tools: they are used to extend our ability, mental or physical.
- Computers are human. Algorithms are instructions, automating human computation, programmatic control of our designs.
- AlphaGo: Google’s DeepMind AI beat the best Go player in the world. AlphaGo can appear to mimic understanding and intuition like humans do.
- Machines can create art. They can generate designs and are great optimizers. Humans, though, are smarter, emotional, irrational, creative. - If they can learn from us, how can we learn from them? What else would we want to teach them? “Master Moves” were discussed that can designers can use to teach machines.
Master Moves (or principles):
- Embrace metaphors (compare to things you’ve seen before)
- Always trust gut (don’t second guess instincts)
- Simplify (you can simplify complexity by drawing a box around it, don’t use more than 2 colors)
- Always consider context
- Make me detail the star
- Exaggerate hierarchy
- Kill your darlings
- Multiple ideas
- Embrace serendipity
- Embrace the glitch
- “Objects can become recipes one you break down the elements.”
- Highlight any object, like a cup. A crushed cup has the same elements as the non-crushed cup, but it’s not the same object.
- What makes a good recipe?
- Can we use the Paranoid Critical Method?
- What if machines can measure if something is ugly? What is beautiful?
- Pip created the Emotive Modeler, which lays out forms into mass, colors into code (“fresh and calming greens,“ emotions into a shape grammar, mapping them to form properties (i.e. directions of objects, aspect ratio, algorithm, spine direction, profile curves, emotions)
What’s next?
- Let’s focus on embracing the glitch and start inserting the glitch into the design process. Let’s combine art and the laws of chance.
- Yossarian = a tool to explore different ways to think about a concept.
- Pip created Design[Human]Design, which is a web tool (and made into physical cards) that embrace serendipity: mixing of descriptions, programming chance into design, pushing you toward interesting directions.
- How can we also be adding glitch into machine personality (i.e. curiosity, bloodymindedness)?
Eyes in the Sky: The Future of AI and Satellites
Harrison Wallace, Peakridge Partners
Pavel Machalek, SpaceKnow
Steve Coast, OpenStreetMap
To be honest, this session was difficult for me to understand. There were some challenges with the presentation like connectivity issues, but it is more likely due to me just not fully understanding AI and technical speak. What I got out of it is that satellite imaging is very powerful. It can scan what we’re doing and narrate our daily lives… which is pretty scary, right?
Here are some quick notes.
- Glider5.com ?? Not sure why I documented this?
- Satellite imaging is the future with precise GPS and fast connection.
- AI with satellites can see anywhere. It can recognize shapes, cities being built, infinite AI that can narrate human activity, classify and analyze all kinds of objects.
- BlackRock article says satellites can help track Chinese companies!
- More sensors to measure what people do. We can teach a computer like a 3 month old human.
- Numbers and data can turn into decisions. As imagery gets cheaper, all value moves to the analysis. Is machine learning going to disappear in the future? No. It is just a process. It used to be called genetic algorithms, but there’s more data and more computation now. Comma.ai = future of self driving cars? I’ll have to do more digging into this, but here’s an article I found so far: Comma One on TechCrunch
101 on Women’s Health: More Than Fertility
Anna Lee, Lioness
Jeff Alvarez, Naya Health
John Waldeisen, Diassess
Ridhi Tariyal, NextGen Jane
This was one of my favorite sessions primarily because I felt so inspired by these companies who are pioneering new technologies to foster, advocate for, and support women’s health. I learned so much about the state of women’s healthcare and challenges we are facing.
Lioness is a vibrator created for women by women that helps you learn about your own body’s sexual response. There is such a taboo around sexual health that causes distance in the understanding of our own bodies. It’s important to remember that you are completely normal!!
Naya Health focuses on moms to give tools and best nutrition for the first 1000 days of their lives. Naya Health also produces smart breast pumps that collects data around the nutritional value of the milk.
Diassess provides disposable DNA tests, bootstrapped diagnostic tests to detects sexually transmitted infections through a self collected vaginal swab.
NextGen Jane created a smart tampon that alerts you of any diseases like endometriosis, ovarian cancer, and gives unprecedented access to novel specimen types. This also helps with long term fertility management and allows women to reach our full potential without thinking too much about tradeoffs for family planning or ovarian health.
Some of the challenges discussed:
- Venture capitalists always want money and results. Most venture capitalists are men, and they don’t understand the product, don’t want to invest, think it’s better in the porno market.
- People are uneducated about STDs. It’s such a taboo topic, but the truth is that STDs are prevalent in 16-24 year olds, and 60% are in women.
- In fact, when trying to create an empathetic scenario to appeal to the male audience by discussing “What if your daughter…,” they reject the notion! The response is, “There’s no way my daughter will have an STD.”
- Even when testing or doing scientific studies, females are often overlooked. For example, the drug Ambien was tested with male mice. They didn’t use female mice for fear that the fluctuating hormone levels would skew the data. Now a widely available drug, it turns out that women don’t metabolize Ambien as well as men BECAUSE of the hormones!
Future of women’s health:
- We’ll see slow and steady growth
- There’s a lot more interest and technological possibilities
- Diseases will be detected earlier
- More empowerment for women
Next steps:
- Understand that women have a lot of buying power
- Minimize fear, be vocal and articulate the problems
- De-stigmatize the “taboo issues” - Men: understand that you know nothing, you don’t know what women want
- Continue the conversation: get people connected to talk, i.e. Boston Tea Parties are gatherings in Boston where women (and men!) can get together and share stories.
Reimagining Old Age: The Frontier of Aging Biology
Matt Kaeberlein, University of Washington
Nathaniel David, UNITY Biotech
Lauren Dunn, NBC
Saul Villeda, UCSF
Some quick facts:
Mammals: A tiny shrew’s lifespan is < 1 year. A bowhead whale’s lifespan is > 200 years. A mollusk can live to 40 years. An ocean onahog can live up to 507 years.
Scientific studies have shown that restricting calories will extend life spans. In studies with two groups of mice, the mice that didn’t feed as much lived much longer.
Notes:
- We are living longer, but we are not living better. : (
- The human lifespan has been augmented, but that’s not necessarily good.
- Aging is not concrete. It is a flexible, malleable thing. Aging has knobs- it can be twisted and turned.
- We can manipulate organisms - we don’t have to accept aging.
- The life extending effect of rapamycin is perhaps ability to suppress age related tumors, but still unsure about whether or not it helps slow down aging. It also may increase the risk of diabetes.
- Senescence means unwanted cells. Senesecent cells relate to biological aging. - Genetically engineered mice: if you eliminate senescent cells, they can run more, and there’s less prevalence of kidney malfunction, cardiac dysfunction, frailty. - Can aging be reversed? Can it apply to to the brain? Typically cognitive function starts declining after age 30. Degenerative diseases increase, and cognitive function decreases as we age. “Your Brain on Aging” Scenario: You can’t remember where you parked your car in a parking lot. You have to rely on the beep noise to find it.
What is driving aging? Can we dial it back?
- Blood flows through every tissue of our body.
- Parabiosis = professing blood of the young with the blood of the old, connecting them like siamese twins. How do each affect each other? The young will have premature aging. The old will have an increase in pro-youthful factors and increase in stem cells. The pro-aging factors and aging inflammations can be targeted and eliminated. Now, how is this ethical? It’s not. That’s why we start with injecting blood and finding things in bloodstream that can be targeted and studied.
- Rapamycin: Rejuvenates immune function and reverses many aspects of aging, and increases lifespan.
- Scientists are trying to learn more about aging through dogs. There is a project called Dog Aging Project where they are looking to extend healthy period of lives of dogs.
- End stage renal disease and kidney failure: currently costs the healthcare industry $35 billion to treat it, which is bigger than the NIH budget. Should we be categorizing aging as a disease? No. We should look at aging as an opportunity for preventative care, preventative medicine, no different than treating Alzheimer’s. We should try to push diseases as far back as possible. We want to compress the “old period” to be right before you die. We want to maximize good health.
- “I would rather die on a tennis court or be killed by a jealous lover than to die of organ failure due to old age.” - Let’s move forward with social reconsideration: healthspan is better than lifespan.
Beyond the Interface: Designing Wearables We Love
Steve Holmes, VP, Product, Innovation, Engineering, Intel New Devices Group
Syuzi Pakhchyan, BCG Digital Ventures, FashioningTech.com
Pauline Dongen, Pauline van Dongen Design Studio
Notes:
- Fashion = a mediator between technology and our bodies.
- Solar dresses and solar shirts, Misfit Bloom Necklace is an activity tracker to wear on body, Nike + Fuel Band, GPS watch sending wellness messages, bracelets or watches, HoloLens, etc. It needs to be fashionable for people to wear it.
- Trends come and go. Pebble is dying down. How can wearables resonate more with people? It’s yet another way of interacting.
- Engineers have a more narrow perspective. Aesthetics = sensory, sociological, psychology, invites you to do something that you otherwise might not do, there’s a relationship to the product, move through the world, engage with the world.
- Respect the intended experiences: Skateboard and an aircraft carrier provide very different experiences.
- How do you get info on a regular basis? How do you interact with these devices? Many companies are trying to take existing smart phone paradigms to wearables, but our bodies are not mobile devices. What are the new interaction paradigms? What is the notion of behavior? Apple Watch became very nagging, then became adaptable.
Questions to consider:
- How can we make it fashionably appropriate?
- What kinds of strokes, vibrations, temperature, mindfulness of directions? (Example discussed: conductive yarn, heating ski jacket, solar powered shirt or backpack) - When can we use accelerometer to track motion? Can we track movement for fitness and health? Can we track how do you walk? How can we teach you about posture?
- For lenses, how can we change perspectives in outcomes?
- For motion, how can we get users to understand flow?
- Social interactions: what does that represent and reflect about ourselves?
- How can we adapt to body? How can we utilize breathing, body temperature, heart rate?
Closing notes:
- Let’s all move away from our screens and engage in more meaningful ways.
- Bring to social realm: sensorial, haptic, communicating, expressing.
- Example discussed: Safety running shirt that lights up. Light is also an expression, allows for interactive behavior, to guide their exercises, and look fabulous at the same time.
- Wearables are very personal and also sociable.
- Google Glass isn’t very popular, but what if it was designed to look like spectacles? Perhaps it would fare better as spectacles…
- Can there be a speech interface? Can the wearable interpret commands?
- How would people respond to usage? What is the interaction language? i.e. Tap 3 times always means x?
- What is the rhythm of communication? i.e. how to play piano with haptics
- Smart phones are an integral part of our lives. We can now interact in a more rich way on a real time basis. Your house can know what you are feeling, adjust temp to hot/cold, understand if you are stressed or happy. Opens up the scope of reality, communication, wearing garments, view fashion and daily garments in a new way, understand that the dynamics of fabric can create movement and layers, and thus, meaningful experiences.
AI’s Final Frontier: Your Living Room
Jeff Wilson, Kasita
This session helped me rethink the meaning of the word “home.” Jeff Wilson is the CEO of Kasita, which are essentially tiny homes, but smart and modern, with industrial design at its core. While I don’t think I could live in a Kasita, I think the notion of turning the home into a full on product experience (instead of as shelter or a roof over our heads) is how we should be thinking about our future living situations.
Notes:
We should stop think about home as a home and start thinking about home as a product. Homes haven’t changed much in centuries. A house is a fixed design. Products are iterative. Houses are built. Products are manufactured. A house stands alone, a product is a brand. A house focuses on interior design, industrial design, but a product focuses on the user experience. How can a home be an experience? We can integrate devices, products, and the benefits of AI (security, transparency, agency, data). We should be careful not to abuse it, though, and continue to create a safe, intimate, and secure home. Caution: lightbulbs may be the next hacker target. 40% of people in large cities live alone. Kasita’s target demographic are individuals who want to live alone in affordable housing and in an urban environment. They can live in a backyard as an urban solution. Targeting families, or even couples, is not ideal for this type of micro home.
Closing statements from Jeff:
Zeitgeists of the bay area are never going to own an average home. Let’s decouple the notion of investing in real estate and instead think about investment in micro real estate. A standalone Kasita dwelling unit is $139,000, and the cost to reserve it is a refundable $1000.
Unlocking Technology for People with Disabilities
Cathy Bodine, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Microsoft
KR Liu, Doppler Labs
Steve Ewell, Consumer Technology Association Foundation
This session covered exactly what the title states: uncovering technology and capabilities for people with disabilities. A question was asked, and one of the panelists answered perfectly and resonated so much with me: Why is accessible design a passion of yours? I want to be able to do anything I can for myself and the people I love or work with with this body before it starts to disappear.
Jenny talked about Microsoft accessibility and its products like the continuously evolving screenreader, the latest version of MS Office has Accessibility Checker in the ribbon (checks to see how accessible your document is before you publish or send something). Spell Check is something that has always been available, it’s out for mainstream users, ensuring that it can be consumed by everyone. Disability is not always visible, but by ensuring that every person can access it, you are being inclusive of everyone.
Doppler Labs is the maker of the Here One wireless earbuds, which essentially communicates with you, allowing you to control the sound you hear and enabling you to hear the world around you.
Notes:
- A lot of people with disabilities live in deep poverty because devices or assistive technologies can be very expensive. The ideal situation is that the hardware or software should be free!
- There are also many challenges with learning new technologies, particularly with the aging and elderly.
- People older generations have increasing spending power. There is a massive shift and increase that the aging market have more independence and are spending more.
- People are losing their hearing much faster than ever before. Young adults experience hearing loss much sooner due to listening to loud music, noise pollution, etc.
- Hearing aids are not covered by insurance!
- In the 1980s, there’s always been a stigma around the words “disability” and “impairments.“ Lots of people would deny it and say, “No, I’m not disabled, but Martha is. You should see Martha…” We should embrace the fact that this is the normal. We will all experience an impairment in our lives. We will all have situationally induced disabilities (i.e. being hungover, tendinitis, etc.).
When thinking about design:
- How can we make hearing aids cool? People wear earbuds for music, not for aid. If we can create one design with MANY uses, that would be ideal and inclusive.
- How can we make it work better and cost less? Let’s start with software bc that’s where we can make the most progress the fastest.
- We shouldn’t use the term “universal design” anymore because a product/service generally doesn’t work for everyone. We should instead be aiming for products and services to be “inclusively designed.” For example, being able to adjust contrast is helpful for people with low vision, but it is also helpful for when you want to sit and work by the beach. Another example is the cordless or one-handed can opener, made by companies like Black and Decker and Chef’n EzSqueeze. The ergonomic design benefits not just people with mobility issues, but it creates more convenience and efficiency for everyone.
Some more examples that were mentioned:
VoiceITT gives voice to those who can’t speak or have difficulty speaking
MS Kinect = translates sign language
Concierge from LightHouse, an information concierge for the blind
SignAloud are gloves that translate sign language into speech
Closing statements:
- Get connected with communities. Example: TeachAccess.org is an organization comprised of tech companies that help industry professionals think and build inclusively.
- Creating personas of people with different abilities will help drive conversations.
- We should be using the term “differently abled” rather than “people with disabilities.” Feedback from users and audience is needed to move forward and make progress.
Reimagining Death: A Design Challenge and Movement
Jason Rissman, Ken Rosenfeld, Torrie Fields, Loren Pogir
OpenIDEO End of Life Challenge
Most people don’t want to think about death. When we do think about death, we hope to live a very healthy and active life for as long as possible and then suddenly die. However, how most of us will die will be a slow progression of declining health and gradual meeting of death.
We want to maximize the quality of life. There is a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering when we are about to die. We’re not seeing quality care. 20% of family members are not kept informed. Care is not consistent with preferences, and places are not designed for people nearing end of life. 25% die in acute care hospitals 28% die in skilled nursing facilities 33% die at home Many patients, as well as hospice nurses and nursing facilities, have unmet needs for pain management and administering pain management.
OpenIDEO uses design thinking to address societal issues. OpenIDEO’s End of Life Challenge started the conversation and movement to “do, connect, tell,” to get people convening around the topic, progress through various phases of design thinking, ground the conversation in empathy.
Projects and outcomes of the challenge:
- Zen Hospice Project helps people pay more attention to death through stories, connections, education, training.
- Sound Will is aiming to improve the audio landscape near end of life, implementing the last sound you want to hear before you die, moving away from the EKG flatlining sound or the chattering about death or just silence.
- Vykarious is a matchmaker of last dreams to people that can help fulfill them. The service connects around the globe to help accomplish bucket list items for people nearing end of life.
I learned what palliative care is all about and how the goal is to improve quality of life for both patients and families of patients. What if learned and talked about death when we are younger? Perhaps that would lead to more change and progress. Death-Ed brings education around death into schools.
End of Life Stories and Re:Imagine allow people to share their own or their loved ones’ stories, patient values, and preferences. We can help shift attitudes and behaviors around death to about living fully and dying meaningfully through conversation and community. A lot of participants at the events so far: 55% do not work in the health field, and many were younger than 45 years old.
Let’s start thinking about merging design and healthcare. What if we had designated healing rooms rather than trying to free up a hospital bed?
I also learned about doulas, which is a person that supports you throughout the entire pregnancy and pre- and post-birthing journey. We have birth doulas. Why can’t we have death doulas?
How can we make green burials more popular? Green burials are environmentally sustainable allowing the body to decompose and recycle naturally, versus conventional burials, which impact the environment a lot more due to chemicals from the materials used.
Closing statements:
There is such a large desire to NOT be dead. Death has no “do over.” So let’s get it right. Let’s recognize healthcare’s ideals and reality: the quality gap is large and persistent. Communities will help drive change (community based innovation, activation, and engagement).
Beyond Driverless Cars
#BeyondDriverless
Panel:
Anthony Foxx, Former US DOT
Don Civgin, Allstate
Neal Ungerleider, Fast Company
Chandra Bhat, UT-Austin
Quick stats:
240 million cars, but only 4% are used It costs 3 trillion dollars to get around 80 billion hours in congestion 40,000 people die in car accidents every year, humans are at fault
Notes:
- How can we get everyone to be able to have access to transportation? How can we reach every rung of the economic ladder? How can we shift the paradigm of vehicle ownership? Families will choose to buy a ride instead of buying the actual asset (the car).
- 3 pillars of transportation: technology, infrastructure, human behavior.
- What are the benefits and/or unintended consequences of ride sharing? Transportation is the bloodline for our lives, and there is an increasing awareness of connectivity. Shared ride vehicles = creates a more shared economy.
- Time matters! 1.5 hours in commute time while riding is better than 1.5 hours of driving. - The benefits of autonomous vehicles is non-trivial. The value is so great that customers will ask for it.
- The auto industry has a lot of shared data such as near miss accidents occurring.
- What about insurance? Rather than consumers buying insurance, it may switch to a commercial insurance system = car manufacturers will buy the insurance and provide that in an all-inclusive package for consumers.
- What about auto industry professions? Do we need that much police? Do we need taxi cab drivers in the future? With less drivers on the road, there would be fewer accidents and fewer infractions. What would happen to the economy when jobs suddenly go away? Or perhaps would more jobs be created from a more shared economy?
- How do we intend to interact with each other? The digital devices in our hands pushes us down, takes us away from reality. The types of interactions with people become more real and grounded (i.e. passenger to passenger, passenger to driver).
Comfort as a parent: Foxx mentioned he has a 12 year old daughter that can’t wait to get her driver’s license. He has concerns about that, as any parent would, but he takes comfort knowing that in a near future, when he is at work and she is at school, he could arrange to put her in a self-driving car, know exactly when it picks her up, when it dropped her off, know if she’s safely arrived at basketball practice, etc.
How will the future be defined? The elderly and millennials are key in how autonomous vehicles and the ride sharing economy will flourish in the future. The elderly are more mobile than ever before, and a lot of them don’t drive. They take public transit, share rides, or get picked up and dropped off by family to go to the grocery store, go hiking, yoga classes, etc. The millennials can’t drive yet so they are heavily reliant on public transit and ride shares to get around. So observing these groups of people’s patterns and behaviors will help shape how this will all play out.
Brain Wearables (IEEE Tech For Humanity Series)
Tan Le, Emotiv
This session was hugely popular with the room packed full of curious camera-ready people. It was so inspiring to hear Tan speak about how the EEG headset can detect brainwaves to transmit data to software. She discussed how it can track signals and electrical brain activity such as measuring levels of stress, relaxation, excitement, etc. Here’s a TechCrunch Video for the Emotiv Neuro-Headset.
Notes:
- The brain is the most important, most vital component of the human body. We can re-shape ourselves and our thought process with our brains.
- Using the Emotiv EEG headset, the wearer can move physical objects with his mind. It can also learn user behavior through brain activity, spending time to recognize demands.
- The headset can change lives dramatically: an example discussed was a person that is paralyzed from the neck down can move objects or communicate using only their thoughts. Here’s a video from CNET around helping ALS patients.
- Some examples to relate to: users can tag personal photos in software or on mobile device, switch on/off lights, change TV channels, perform specific actions in video games.
- Neuroplasticity: The headset can also be used to modify behavior (cognitive behavioral therapy). It can train ourselves to focus and concentrate on a single task like reading and minimize distractions. It can introduce feedback like when to take a break or get up and take a walk.
The live demo at the end was challenging as EVERYONE in the room had a mobile device so there was too much bluetooth interference to get the object to move. When it finally did, though, it was really cool to see. Everyone had already stopped paying attention to the volunteer demonstrator, and when the ball moved, it moved so fast. Tan’s closing statements included how there is much more improvement to be made, but there are vast opportunities in the medical industry as well as making a positive impact to improve the state of thew role through the democratization of access.