Future World

Spending as much time in the future as possible with technology, interfaces, and design. Collated and written by Matthew Licata. I'm @miraimatt on Twitter.

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Review: Metallica – “Hardwired... to Self-Destruct”

Imagine a sandwich shop that had been very successful in popularizing new, interesting types of sandwiches. All of the ingredients were high quality, and there were some things you’d never seen on a sandwich before (like chipotle mayo circa a decade ago).

Then they decided they’d rather make burritos. Burritos were the hot new thing. Their burritos weren’t that bad, but a whole lot of people missed the sandwiches they used to make.

Then they made a weird wrap with rotten ingredients.

Then they go back to making sandwiches. A lot of people are interested because they wanted more sandwiches from this shop for years! But these new sandwiches aren’t very good; they seem more like an acknowledgement that people liked the sandwiches the shop used to make, and less like the product of a genuine interest in making delicious sandwiches.

“Hardwired… to Self-Destruct” is a microwaved bologna sandwich topped with iceberg lettuce and Velveeta on stale Wonderbread. Sure: it is a sandwich. But there’s really not a lot there.

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Report Card: Knights of Sidonia

(screenshot from Kotaku)

Thirty-eight letter grades are given to various attributes of the “Netflix Original” 24-episode modern dramatic robot anime series.

It can be unclear whether these grades represent the quality of an attribute in this work relative to other implementations of a similar attribute: “How is this celery relative to other servings of celery?”, or how I feel about the inclusion of that attribute in the first place: “Is this celery in any way justifying its existence?” (the answer is always no except when served with wings). I trust you to figure out which ones are which, though.

Space & Robot Graphics: A

Ridiculous Teen Harem Drama: C-

Centered Around Outrageous, Blindly Clumsy Wish-Fulfillment: D

This Is Actually Harmful to Teens, I Think: F

Not Speaking Firsthand or Anything Though: A+

However: Space & Robot Graphics: A

Particle Effects: A

Vague But Extremely Serious Relationships that Never Amount to Anything: D

Probably to Let Fans of Each Girl in the Show Continue Undeterred So They Buy More Stuff: F

Teens: B

Action Cinematography: B+

Physics: A-

Lasers: A-

Robots: B+

Robot Design Coolness: B

Yelling While Piloting Robots: A

Reluctant Pilots: A

Prissy Aristocratic Types: B

Seemingly Infinitely-Sized Shadowy Operations Command Rooms: A

Shadowy All-Controlling Organizations: A

A Creepily Unseen Secretive Council Surprisingly Actually Running Things: A

Originality: C

Space Colonization & Travel: A

Scary Aliens (Huge Creature-Type, Not Person-Type): B

Sound Production: A

Fanservice: A+

Using the Benefits of Computer-Based Animation: B+

Being One of These New Anime With Normal Hair Colors Where I Can’t Tell Anyone Apart: A+

It's Really Hard When They're All Wearing Helmets, OK: A+

Skimping by Cutting to Character's Reactions Instead of Animating Scenes: D

Saving Production Money for a Big Finale by Having Many Episodes of Total Junk Leading Up to It, to the Extent that I Become Terribly Bored: A+

Teamwork: A

Pacing: D+

Mask-Wearing: B

A Big Talking Bear Person: A

A Flimsy Excuse for All of the Women to Take Their Clothes Off but Inexplicably Never the Men: A+

A Total Sephiroth Dude: A

Risk-Takingness: C-

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A new logo for the Met Museum raises questions about how we evaluate new identities.

Michael Bierut:

There are many examples of symbols that might have been dismissed as underwhelming at their birth, from Chanel to Nike. What they have in common is what Paul Rand called "the pleasure of recognition and the promise of meaning." What everyone gets confused about is the difference between meaning and the promise of it; like the "pursuit of happiness," what you're guaranteed is not success but its potential.

How do you design for potential meaning? How do you convince a client to view a new identity not as a purchase, but as an investment?

I have been increasingly fascinated by this process in recent years. When my team was working on a new logo for a major telecommunications company last year, I felt we had arrived at a solution that solved every problem but one: it didn't demonstrate how creative we were. After many attempts, I came to feel that all these gestures were self-indulgent and, in fact, interfered with the communication of clarity and simplicity. We went with the simple solution and took the consequences.

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Questions of representation are central to the practice of graphic design. An understanding of who we are speaking for, and who we are speaking to, is the starting point of any design brief. It is through this role of mediation, expressed as aesthetic form, that design enacts its power and responsibility. However, this mediation often happens uncritically, guided by a designer’s intuition, stylistic trends, and the instrumental framework of marketing and PR concerns. A multiplicity of factors, conscious and unconscious, play into a designer’s aesthetic choices of imagery, typography, composition and colour. And as much as some might argue to the contrary, none of these choices are neutral.

In the case of colour, Pantone Inc. holds incredible influence with their increasingly marketed and mediatised Colour of the Year campaigns. Purportedly determined through a prescient reading of the cultural zeitgeist (by a select cabal of colour specialists), it is important to understand that the company, and the industry it serves, have their own specific interests and agendas that drive these selections. Pantone’s choice of “Rose Quartz” and “Serenity” as the 2016 Colour of the Year is the most insidious move by this colour-industrial-complex since “Blue Iris” in 2008. As with “Blue Iris”, Pantone has once again mined the subcultural landscape and used their monopoly within the creative industries to propagate their colour properties to the world.

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Inside Out

Inside Out was a really interesting movie.

There were a lot of on-their-face positive qualities:

The animation was beautiful in both the details it included and those it left out. Great taste was exercised in deciding the things to do and the things not to do.

The writing was tight and funny. It had just the right amount of referencey in-jokes without at all approaching Trying Too Hard Territory. (I’d call this perfect balance as “The Animaniacs Zone,” but I haven’t watched Animaniacs in a long time.)

The voice acting was superb, and extra enjoyable if you like playing the “spot the actor by their voice” game and also watch a lot of single-camera sitcoms and Saturday Night Live. Even Metal Gear Solid’s The Boss was in it for a few brief moments! She’s had other, more closely related roles too, but she’ll always be The Boss to me.

But beyond that:

No part of it felt dictated by someone thinking “We are building a brand and a franchise. Yeah, this will definitely make lots of money and will totally sell tons of merch.”

It’s so easy to aim down to the lowest common denominator. You can tell because most movies do. Why try to say something when doing so might confuse some people or put them off?

For a movie – especially a kids’ movie – to be complicated, to mean something, to make people think about the way they look at the world, it takes vision and commitment.

It’s still a product, of course. We’re talking about a thing that (reportedly) cost one hundred seventy-five million dollars to produce and (reportedly) made about twice that in the US.

But it feels like Pixar’s primary goal is not to make a bunch of money, but to do what they feel is right and create what they feel is a great thing, and the money will follow from there. It’s as uncommon as it is admirable.

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Spotify’s Privacy Policy is Mostly Fine

Gordon Gottsegen at Wired:

SPOTIFY RELEASED A new privacy policy that is now in effect, and it turns out that the company wants to learn a lot more about you and there’s not much you can do about it.

I’m all for calling out creepy privacy policies, but Spotify’s actually seems fine. Most of the items mentioned are clearly in service of a user-facing feature in Spotify.

Let’s go through them. All further quotes are from Spotify’s privacy policy.

“With your permission, we may collect information stored on your mobile device, such as contacts, photos, or media files. Local law may require that you seek the consent of your contacts to provide their personal information to Spotify, which may use that information for the purposes specified in this Privacy Policy.”

Contacts. Want to be able to check your contacts to find your friends on Spotify? Maybe you don’t personally—and if not, you don’t have to give Spotify permission to access your contacts!—but a lot of people want to be able to do that when signing up for a service with a social component. This would be true of any service with this functionality.

The second sentence sounds weird, but it also sounds like a legalese disclaimer they were forced to put in there. There’s a law requiring this somewhere, so here it is.

Media files. Spotify can play the non-DRMed files on your device. To do so, they need to access them. Possibly to make better recommendations, they collect data about these files. That’s just a theory, but a music service collecting data about your music hardly seems like an overreach.

Photos. This is the one thing that does seem creepy. I can’t think of an explanation for this one.

“Depending on the type of device that you use to interact with the Service and your settings, we may also collect information about your location based on, for example, your phone’s GPS location or other forms of locating mobile devices (e.g., Bluetooth). We may also collect sensor data (e.g., data about the speed of your movements, such as whether you are running, walking, or in transit).”

GPS location. Popular stuff near you. I don’t recall if they have this feature at the moment, but it’s a standard thing to measure and offer.

Sensor data. Spotify Running, which a writer at Wired (UK) found “extremely helpful,” tailors its playback to your workout in real-time. It needs this sensor data to do that.

“You may integrate your Spotify account with Third Party Applications. If you do, we may receive similar information related to your interactions with the Service on the Third Party Application, as well as information about your publicly available activity on the Third Party Application. This includes, for example, your “Like”s and posts on Facebook.”

Spotify wants to know about when people use Spotify to post to Facebook (or Twitter or LiveJournal or whatever). Nothing is weird about this – Spotify is already part of the transaction.

Spotify also wants to possibly do things with your publicly available information, which is a little creepy in that there’s no direct user-facing benefit, but it is public activity. For better or worse, this seems standard these days.

I’m not writing this because I have some affinity for Spotify and think they can do no wrong. I haven’t even been a Spotify Premium subscriber for a while now. I’m writing this because I care about the abuse of privacy policies and EULAs, and a (deliberately?) sensationalized article like this one is a rather unhelpful thing. Misrepresenting and crying wolf over a policy document that’s actually rather reasonable makes it harder for everyone to understand and address the truly bad situations where these policies are disrespectful, overbearing, or hostile.

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[future---world]

The Google–Alphabet Thing

It’s simple (I think): even gigantic tech company founder/executives can get sick of their jobs and start to think they could be doing something better.

So Larry and Sergey got tired of “just” being executives of one of the largest technology companies on Earth. They saw all the wild, vaguely Lex Luthor-esque “fun” people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are having outside of the confines of their primary companies and wanted in on that lifestyle, because nothing is ever enough. Or they altruistically thought they could “make more of a difference.” Who knows!

They didn’t want to spend their days running Google anymore… but they also didn’t want to not run Google anymore. So they set up a system in which Sundar Pichai handles it, but they can still tell him what to do when they want to.

But there’s more: in a step past Musk and Bezos, they set things up so that Google’s money funds Alphabet’s projects. Other all-powerful tech executives generally use their own personal wealth for their “moonshots” (which is kind of literal since both Musk and Bezos have space travel side-companies). Amazon doesn’t own the Washington Post—Jeff Bezos does.

Alphabet’s setup seems optimized to provide Larry and Sergey maximum flexibility and power. They don’t have to be in charge of running Google, but they can be when they want to be. New projects out of left field don’t have to align with Google’s goals, brand, business model, etc., because those projects aren’t a part of Google. But they still get to spend Google’s money.

This arrangement might also the optimal way to get the outrageous stuff done. Theoretically, at least, it removes the executives’ perceived obstacles and “enables greater innovation”/“pushes things forward”/whatever phrase sounds best to you. I don’t think that’s an accident.

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Might be getting a little obscure…

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Apple Watch, Day 4: What He Said

I concur with pretty much everything John Gruber wrote in his post “Watch, Apple Watch.”

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Apple Watch, Day 4: Battery Life Update

With normal usage, Apple Watch’s battery life is totally fine (for me). It’s just before midnight right now, and I have 38% remaining after charging it overnight last night and wearing it all day today. Granted, I didn’t work out today, but it’d have to be a heck of a workout to cause an issue. (I’m wearing the 38mm model, too, so the 42mm Watch would last even longer.)

It seems about on par with the kind of battery life I get from my iPhone. I bet that’s no coincidence.

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Apple Watch, Day 3: Delight

Force Touch, the Digital Crown, and the Taptic Engine are just plain fun to experience. After years of fingers on glass paired with increasingly functional but decreasingly whimsical interfaces, it's a joy to manipulate something that feels circular, smooth, and tactile. It reminds me of the initial novelty of the iPod's click wheel. It all feels great, and I've already found myself trying to Force Touch on my iPhone. (Can't be too far off.)

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Apple Watch, Day 2

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Apple Watch, Day 2: The Best Workout iPod

Apple Watch is—at the very least—the absolute best “workout iPod” I've ever used.

Interesting and motivating data about your progress and your goals is clearly displayed and easily accessed. It’s like the computers on treadmills, except that instead of being awful, it’s wonderful. (Who knows why, but gym cardio equipment is a user interface hellscape and I swear it’s only getting worse.) It’s nice to have something that’s more personal, portable, and versatile.

One especially nice touch is that after you meet your goal, the Workout app keeps counting. It's true in the everyday Activity app too: after you fill one of your daily Activity rings, the ring keeps going around for a second lap. By continuing to count after your goal has been met, it encourages you to keep going, unlike a lot of other workout equipment and trackers that just ends things immediately. (“Goal met! Who cares about anything anymore since nothing else counts at all.”)

Regarding the iPod part of the equation, it's very convenient to change your music on the fly—easier than it was with a click wheel iPod, which itself was easier than manipulating an iPhone. There's nothing to get out and unlock: a few presses and spins of the Digital Crown and a couple taps on the screen and you're listening to any album or playlist you want. I get pretty picky with my music while working out—it’s hard to know in advance what I’ll find motivating and what I won’t want to hear—so being able to easily change things up on the go is really nice.

Tracking a workout does seem to do a number on your battery life since it constantly monitors your heart rate, though since people generally shower after working out it seems like more than enough time to charge the Watch and regain any battery power consumed during the workout.

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Apple Watch, Day 2: Carrying a Phone is Not the Problem

A discovery: the biggest problem with working out with a phone isn't carrying the phone, it's needing to interact with it and have a wire connecting to it. With Apple Watch, Bluetooth headphones, and a running belt pouch kind of thing (I don’t know if there is an established term for this type of item, but I swear it's not a "fanny pack," OK?!) I almost forgot I was carrying my iPhone.