#Design Technology

[ego-sum-ex-altiora]

So my DT assignment (final) is due in four days. Here’s where I’m at now;

32/50 pages

3/6 sections

50 drawings

Biggest cram session yet!!! Will update tonight on how it goes.

[d-3-s-i-g-n-deactivated]

[thisisrealy2kok]

[prokopetz]

Okay, so: there's a local restaurant whose online ordering process involves various selecting various sauces to be included with one's order – so many units of teriyaki sauce, so many units of hot sauce, so may units of peanut sauce, and so forth.

The idea is supposed to be that you can select any combination of sauces you want, as long as it adds up to no more than four units. However, what the app actually required is that you select exactly four units of sauces; it wouldn't let you submit the ordering form if the total wasn't exactly four.

Just today I discovered that they seem to have fixed it... not by correcting the errant validation rule, but by adding a "no sauce" option, which counts toward the required total of four.

Thus, it's now possible to place an order with, say, two units of teriyaki sauce rather than four by entering 2x "teriyaki sauce" and 2x "no sauce". Similarly, an order with no sauce at all is 4x "no sauce".

This is quite possibly the least intuitive ordering process I've ever encountered, and I've literally worked in e-commerce.

[hinamie]

ṇ̵̛̱͌̅̃͛̔o̴̮̓̀͂́̃_̴̛̲́s̷͈̋̈́̄̋͠ị̶͔̗̐͐̐̒̕g̵̛̱̘̣̑͂ņ̴̰͔̘͇̏̒̓̇͠͝a̸̜̥̩̭͋̌ḷ̶͔̖͗͋͛͛̃͆

[thegroovyarchives]

Mid-Century Radios From Genuine Plastic Radios of the Mid-Century, Ken Jupp & Leslie Piña, 1998.

[natsumipocket]

Game Boy Color - Atomic Purple, 1998

[nnaalluuaa]

Sanyo Healthy Capsule at Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan

[prototechsolutionsblog]

CAD Automation: Redefining the Design Landscape for Success

In the world of modern engineering and design, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) has revolutionized the way products are conceived, developed, and manufactured. As technology continues to advance, CAD automation emerges as a key player in enhancing design efficiency and fostering innovation. This blog post delves into the realm of CAD automation, exploring its significance, benefits, challenges, and potential future trends.

 Understanding CAD Automation

CAD automation refers to the process of utilizing software tools and scripts to streamline various aspects of the design process. It involves automating repetitive tasks, generating complex designs, and facilitating seamless collaboration between designers and engineers. The goal of CAD automation is to reduce manual effort, minimize errors, improve consistency, and accelerate the overall design cycle.

 Significance of CAD Automation

 1. Efficiency Enhancement:

Automating routine and time-consuming tasks, such as dimensioning, detailing, and generating drawings, allows designers and engineers to allocate more time to creative and high-value tasks. This not only accelerates the design process but also increases productivity and reduces the risk of human errors.

 2. Design Iteration and Optimization:

Automation tools enable rapid design iteration. Designers can easily generate variations of a concept, test different parameters, and evaluate multiple scenarios. This iterative process aids in identifying the most optimal design solution and fosters innovation.

 3. Consistency and Standardization:

CAD automation enforces design standards and guidelines consistently across projects. This ensures that designs adhere to industry best practices and regulatory requirements, reducing the chances of errors caused by deviations from standards.

 4. Complex Geometry and Customization:

Automated scripts and parametric modeling techniques enable the creation of intricate and complex geometries that might be challenging to achieve manually. Additionally, automation allows for easy customization of designs to meet specific customer requirements.

 5. Collaboration and Communication:

CAD automation tools facilitate seamless collaboration between cross-functional teams. Design modifications, updates, and feedback can be efficiently communicated and integrated into the design process, enhancing teamwork and reducing communication gaps.

 Benefits of CAD Automation

 1. Time Savings:

Automating repetitive tasks drastically reduces the time required for design and drafting. This leads to faster project completion and quicker time-to-market for products.

 2. Error Reduction:

Human errors are inevitable in manual tasks, but automation significantly reduces the risk. Consistent and standardized designs generated by automation tools mitigate the chances of costly mistakes.

 3. Innovation Encouragement:

By handling routine tasks, designers can focus on exploring innovative design concepts and pushing boundaries. This results in more creative and inventive solutions.

 4. Cost Efficiency:

Efficient design processes translate to cost savings. Reduced design time, fewer errors, and optimized designs contribute to lower production costs.

 5. Enhanced Quality:

Automation tools ensure that designs adhere to defined standards, leading to higher-quality outputs that meet or exceed customer expectations.

 Challenges of CAD Automation

While CAD automation offers numerous benefits, it's important to acknowledge the challenges that come with its implementation:

 1. Initial Setup Complexity:

Developing and implementing automation scripts requires specialized skills and time. Setting up an automation workflow can be complex and resource-intensive.

 2. Maintenance and Updates:

Automation workflows need continuous monitoring and updates to remain effective. Changes in design requirements or software updates may necessitate adjustments to the automation process.

 3. Skill Requirements:

CAD automation demands a certain level of programming and scripting skills. Not all design professionals possess these skills, which might lead to a skill gap within the team.

 4. Balancing Automation and Creativity:

While automation improves efficiency, there's a concern that excessive automation might stifle creativity. Striking the right balance is crucial to ensure that designers still have the freedom to innovate.

 Future Trends in CAD Automation

The future of CAD automation holds exciting possibilities:

 1. AI-Powered Design Generation:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) could play a significant role in generating design concepts based on user inputs and requirements. This could lead to the rapid creation of diverse design options.

 2. Cloud-Based Collaboration:

Collaboration tools and CAD software are likely to move towards the cloud, enabling real-time collaboration between team members regardless of their geographical location.

 3. Integration with Simulation and Analysis:

Automation could seamlessly integrate design with simulation and analysis tools, allowing for quicker evaluation of design performance and optimization.

 4. Generative Design Evolution:

Generative design algorithms, driven by AI, could become more advanced, producing complex designs that consider multiple variables and constraints.

 Conclusion

CAD automation is transforming the design landscape by freeing designers from repetitive tasks, empowering them to innovate, and enhancing design efficiency. While challenges exist, the benefits of CAD automation outweigh the drawbacks, and the continuous evolution of technology promises even greater possibilities in the future. Embracing CAD automation can position design teams at the forefront of innovation and efficiency in the rapidly evolving engineering and manufacturing industries.

ProtoTech Solutions' journey into the realm of CAD automation is a testament to the transformative power of technology. Their commitment to streamlining design processes, fostering innovation, and embracing the future sets an inspiring example for the entire design and engineering community. As ProtoTech Solutions continues to pioneer advancements in CAD automation, the design landscape stands poised for a future of unprecedented efficiency, creativity, and collaboration.

[portugaldesignlab]

Why 10,000 tiny lenses are the key to our sci-fi future | Hard Reset

Major top notch technology for Cameras 

WOOOOOW

[myjetpack]

My latest Guardian Books cartoon.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How lock-in hurts design

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

If you've ever read about design, you've probably encountered the idea of "paving the desire path." A "desire path" is an erosion path created by people departing from the official walkway and taking their own route. The story goes that smart campus planners don't fight the desire paths laid down by students; they pave them, formalizing the route that their constituents have voted for with their feet.

Desire paths aren't always great (Wikipedia notes that "desire paths sometimes cut through sensitive habitats and exclusion zones, threatening wildlife and park security"), but in the context of design, a desire path is a way that users communicate with designers, creating a feedback loop between those two groups. The designers make a product, the users use it in ways that surprise the designer, and the designer integrates all that into a new revision of the product.

This method is widely heralded as a means of "co-innovating" between users and companies. Designers who practice the method are lauded for their humility, their willingness to learn from their users. Tech history is strewn with examples of successful paved desire-paths.

Take John Deere. While today the company is notorious for its war on its customers (via its opposition to right to repair), Deere was once a leader in co-innovation, dispatching roving field engineers to visit farms and learn how farmers had modified their tractors. The best of these modifications would then be worked into the next round of tractor designs, in a virtuous cycle:

https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/

But this pattern is even more pronounced in the digital world, because it's much easier to update a digital service than it is to update all the tractors in the field, especially if that service is cloud-based, meaning you can modify the back-end everyone is instantly updated. The most celebrated example of this co-creation is Twitter, whose users created a host of its core features.

Retweets, for example, were a user creation. Users who saw something they liked on the service would type "RT" and paste the text and the link into a new tweet composition window. Same for quote-tweets: users copied the URL for a tweet and pasted it in below their own commentary. Twitter designers observed this user innovation and formalized it, turning it into part of Twitter's core feature-set.

Companies are obsessed with discovering digital desire paths. They pay fortunes for analytics software to produce maps of how their users interact with their services, run focus groups, even embed sneaky screen-recording software into their web-pages:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-dark-side-of-replay-sessions-that-record-your-every-move-online/

This relentless surveillance of users is pursued in the name of making things better for them: let us spy on you and we'll figure out where your pain-points and friction are coming from, and remove those. We all win!

But this impulse is a world apart from the humility and respect implied by co-innovation. The constant, nonconsensual observation of users has more to do with controlling users than learning from them.

That is, after all, the ethos of modern technology: the more control a company can exert over its users ,the more value it can transfer from those users to its shareholders. That's the key to enshittification, the ubiquitous platform decay that has degraded virtually all the technology we use, making it worse every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

When you are seeking to control users, the desire paths they create are all too frequently a means to wrestling control back from you. Take advertising: every time a service makes its ads more obnoxious and invasive, it creates an incentive for its users to search for "how do I install an ad-blocker":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

More than half of all web-users have installed ad-blockers. It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But zero app users have installed ad-blockers, because reverse-engineering an app requires that you bypass its encryption, triggering liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law provides for a $500,000 fine and a 5-year prison sentence for "circumvention" of access controls:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Beyond that, modifying an app creates liability under copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets, noncompete, nondisclosure and so on. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

This is why services are so horny to drive you to install their app rather using their websites: they are trying to get you to do something that, given your druthers, you would prefer not to do. They want to force you to exit through the gift shop, you want to carve a desire path straight to the parking lot. Apps let them mobilize the law to literally criminalize those desire paths.

An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it (or do anything else that wrestles value back from a company). Apps are web-pages where everything not forbidden is mandatory.

Seen in this light, an app is a way to wage war on desire paths, to abandon the cooperative model for co-innovation in favor of the adversarial model of user control and extraction.

Corporate apologists like to claim that the proliferation of apps proves that users like them. Neoliberal economists love the idea that business as usual represents a "revealed preference." This is an intellectually unserious tautology: "you do this, so you must like it":

https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/hp-ceo-says-customers-are-a-bad-investment-unless-they-can-be-made-to-buy-companys-drm-ink-cartridges.html

Calling an action where no alternatives are permissible a "preference" or a "choice" is a cheap trick – especially when considered against the "preferences" that reveal themselves when a real choice is possible. Take commercial surveillance: when Apple gave Ios users a choice about being spied on – a one-click opt of of app-based surveillance – 96% of users choice no spying:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/

But then Apple started spying on those very same users that had opted out of spying by Facebook and other Apple competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Neoclassical economists aren't just obsessed with revealed preferences – they also love to bandy about the idea of "moral hazard": economic arrangements that tempt people to be dishonest. This is typically applied to the public ("consumers" in the contemptuous parlance of econospeak). But apps are pure moral hazard – for corporations. The ability to prohibit desire paths – and literally imprison rivals who help your users thwart those prohibitions – is too tempting for companies to resist.

The fact that the majority of web users block ads reveals a strong preference for not being spied on ("users just want relevant ads" is such an obvious lie that doesn't merit any serious discussion):

https://www.iccl.ie/news/82-of-the-irish-public-wants-big-techs-toxic-algorithms-switched-off/

Giant companies attained their scale by learning from their users, not by thwarting them. The person using technology always knows something about what they need to do and how they want to do it that the designers can never anticipate. This is especially true of people who are unlike those designers – people who live on the other side of the world, or the other side of the economic divide, or whose bodies don't work the way that the designers' bodies do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

Apps – and other technologies that are locked down so their users can be locked in – are the height of technological arrogance. They embody a belief that users are to be told, not heard. If a user wants to do something that the designer didn't anticipate, that's the user's fault:

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

Corporate enthusiasm for prohibiting you from reconfiguring the tools you use to suit your needs is a declaration of the end of history. "Sure," John Deere execs say, "we once learned from farmers by observing how they modified their tractors. But today's farmers are so much stupider and we are so much smarter that we have nothing to learn from them anymore."

Spying on your users to control them is a poor substitute asking your users their permission to learn from them. Without technological self-determination, preferences can't be revealed. Without the right to seize the means of computation, the desire paths never emerge, leaving designers in the dark about what users really want.

Our policymakers swear loyalty to "innovation" but when corporations ask for the right to decide who can innovate and how, they fall all over themselves to create laws that let companies punish users for the crime of contempt of business-model.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

Image: Belem (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desire_path_%2819811581366%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[thisisrealy2kok]

Power Mac G4 (1999-2004)

[d-3-s-i-g-n-deactivated]

[prokopetz]

Like, I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but it's kind of bleakly entertaining how over the course of my life my skill set as an online researcher has gone from being:

Hugely valuable in the late 1990s and early 2000s because the discoverability of information in public-facing databases was fucking terrible and nobody knew how to organise anything; to

Effectively useless throughout the 2010s because search engines enormously and rapidly improved and computer literacy was at an all-time high; and

Back to being hugely valuable once again because SEO bullshit and the proliferation of AI-generated content have degraded online discoverability back to pre-2000 levels and computer literacy is in accelerating decline due to mobile devices deliberately obfuscating basic functionality so that app vendors can sell it back to you with embedded advertising.