Co.Design
08.31.177:00 am
By Katharine Schwab 2 minute Read
One of the most annoying things about digital voice assistants is that they don’t work across platforms. You may use a Microsoft computer at work, an iPhone when you’re mobile, and an Amazon Echo at home, but the assistants that come with each device don’t talk to each other, so they aren’t able to help you seamlessly throughout your day. That’s about to change.?ifically for Alexa by third-party developers. On the flip side, Echo owners will be able to ask Alexa to open Cortana and then access some of Cortana’s features that coordinate with Microsoft Office–like booking meetings and reading a work email address. The idea is to help break down barriers between the two ecosystems, allowing users to access more information even if it’s on different platforms.
The integration is expected to roll out by the end of 2017, according to the New York Times, and it probably won’t be terribly smooth at first. But Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that in the future, he envisions that users will make a request and whichever AI is better equipped will answer it.
Set aside, for a moment, the irresistible Darwinian dynamic that would create between tech superpowers–a kind of Lord of the Flies for AI. This would represent a major paradigm shift. In the past, the big tech companies have been laser-focused on building their own digital platforms. Why collaborate with competitors and make it easier for users to integrate multiple platforms when each company is invested in keeping users on its own platform?
[Photo: Microsoft]
Amazon is a unique case. The company has been advocating for interoperability between digital assistants for months, pointing out that allowing assistants to talk to each other is fundamentally better for the user.
Which sounds all warm and fuzzy. But it’s worth noting that Amazon is the only one of the major platforms that doesn’t have its own operating system–so it has more to gain from giving users access to the services it doesn’t currently provide compared with, say, Apple or Google. It’s also easy to see why Microsoft would want to collaborate. Neither Microsoft nor Amazon has a robust mobile presence (unlike Google and Apple). Increasing user loyalty in the office and in the home would likely strengthen their relative positions.
Good for users, or good for the bottom line? In this case, it’s probably both.
About the author
Katharine Schwab is a contributing writer at Co.Design based in New York who covers technology, design, and culture. Follow her on Twitter @kschwabable.
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08.17.17
This Designer Built A Secret Studio That Hangs Beneath An Underpass
Fernando Abellanas transformed the underside of a concrete bridge in Valencia into a hidden workspace.
1/11 [Image: courtesy Lebrel]
By Meg Miller2 minute Read
Cities contain miles and miles of elevated infrastructure: bridges, elevated train tracks, swooping highway ramps. They support thousands of commuters, tourists, and others traveling through the city. Beneath them stretch miles and miles of urban underpasses that are empty, dangerous, and virtually unusable.
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[Image: courtesy Lebrel]
The best ways to clean up and make use of these spaces is an issue urban planners and architects in cities worldwide have sought to address, with efforts that include making underpasses well-lit and building parks in the unused space. They might take note of the work of self-taught furniture designer Fernando Abellanas, who has transformed the underside of a bridge in Valencia, Spain, into an ingenious, pop-up workspace. Abellanas’s design is half floating studio, half horizontal elevator: One part is a metal and plywood box that moves across the underside of the bridge on wheels. When it gets to the far side, a shelf, chair, and desk bolted into the wall fit into the structure to complete the studio.
[Image: courtesy Lebrel]
The result is a whimsical little alcove, nestled into a graffitied, abandoned piece of Valencia’s infrastructure–what most would consider urban blight. In Abellanas’s hands, the area is transformed into something surreal and delightful, the ultimate hiding spot. In the video above, you can watch Abellanas as he climbs into the structure from the ramped side of the underpass, then uses the handcrank to propel it to the other side. Wheels that look like they were taken from a metal dolly roll the structure along the concrete of the bridge on either side. As it approaches the bolted furniture, the desk, and chair slip into the structure from its open side.
[Image: courtesy Lebrel]
Abellanas, who makes furniture under the label Lebrel, clearly has a knack for the imaginative. His project is self-directed, and it’s not officially sanctioned by the city. But it does echo other cities’ efforts to transform similar unused spaces, such as the Under the Elevated project, an effort between Design Trust for Public Space and the N.Y.C. Department of Transportation that seeks ways to reclaim and transform the spaces under the city’s elevated transit infrastructure. Architects are also leading projects to redesign underpasses, such as this recent project in the Netherlands. Still others have created ad-hoc habitats in these unused areas, as captured by photographer Gisela Erlacher in her book Skies of Concrete. Urban planners and architects could learn from the creativity of individuals who don’t have to work with city budgets or building codes.
The Spaces reports that Abellanas will ultimately create a collection of studios like this one, scattered throughout the city in undisclosed locations. “The project is an ephemeral intervention, [it will remain] until someone finds it and decides to steal the materials, or the authorities remove it,” Abellanas tells The Spaces.
Only a lucky few will come across this hidden gem while it’s still up–for everyone else, feel free to marvel at the images in the slide show above.
About the author
Meg Miller is an associate editor at Co.Design covering art, technology, and design.
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07.14.17
AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand. Should We Stop It?
Researchers at Facebook realized their bots were chattering in a new language. Then they stopped it.
AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand. Should We Stop It?
[Source Images: Nikiteev_Konstantin/iStock, Zozulinskyi/iStock]
By Mark Wilson6 minute Read
Bob: “I can can I I everything else.”
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Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”
To you and I, that passage looks like nonsense. But what if I told you this nonsense was the discussion of what might be the most sophisticated negotiation software on the planet? Negotiation software that had learned, and evolved, to get the best deal possible with more speed and efficiency–and perhaps, hidden nuance–than you or I ever could? Because it is.
This conversation occurred between two AI agents developed inside Facebook. At first, they were speaking to each other in plain old English. But then researchers realized they’d made a mistake in programming.
“There was no reward to sticking to English language,” says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). As these two agents competed to get the best deal–a very effective bit of AI vs. AI dogfighting researchers have dubbed a “generative adversarial network”–neither was offered any sort of incentive for speaking as a normal person would. So they began to diverge, eventually rearranging legible words into seemingly nonsensical sentences.
“Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves,” says Batra, speaking to a now-predictable phenomenon that’s been observed again, and again, and again. “Like if I say ‘the’ five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.”
[Screenshot: courtesy Facebook]
Indeed. Humans have developed unique dialects for everything from trading pork bellies on the floor of the Mercantile Exchange to hunting down terrorists as Seal Team Six–simply because humans sometimes perform better by not abiding to normal language conventions.
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So should we let our software do the same thing? Should we allow AI to evolve its dialects for specific tasks that involve speaking to other AIs? To essentially gossip out of our earshot? Maybe; it offers us the possibility of a more interoperable world, a more perfect place where iPhones talk to refrigerators that talk to your car without a second thought.
The tradeoff is that we, as humanity, would have no clue what those machines were actually saying to one another.
We Teach Bots To Talk, But We’ll Never Learn Their Language
Facebook ultimately opted to require its negotiation bots to speak in plain old English. “Our interest was having bots who could talk to people,” says Mike Lewis, research scientist at FAIR. Facebook isn’t alone in that perspective. When I inquired to Microsoft about computer-to-computer languages, a spokesperson clarified that Microsoft was more interested in human-to-computer speech. Meanwhile, Google, Amazon, and Apple are all also focusing incredible energies on developing conversational personalities for human consumption. They’re the next wave of user interface, like the mouse and keyboard for the AI era.
The other issue, as Facebook admits, is that it has no way of truly understanding any divergent computer language. “It’s important to remember, there aren’t bilingual speakers of AI and human languages,” says Batra. We already don’t generally understand how complex AIs think because we can’t really see inside their thought process. Adding AI-to-AI conversations to this scenario would only make that problem worse.
But at the same time, it feels shortsighted, doesn’t it? If we can build software that can speak to other software more efficiently, shouldn’t we use that? Couldn’t there be some benefit?
[Source Images: Nikiteev_Konstantin/iStock, Zozulinskyi/iStock]
Because, again, we absolutely can lead machines to develop their own languages. Facebook has three published papers proving it. “It’s definitely possible, it’s possible that [language] can be compressed, not just to save characters, but compressed to a form that it could express a sophisticated thought,” says Batra. Machines can converse with any baseline building blocks they’re offered. That might start with human vocabulary, as with Facebook’s negotiation bots. Or it could start with numbers, or binary codes. But as machines develop meanings, these symbols become “tokens”–they’re imbued with rich meanings. As Dauphin points out, machines might not think as you or I do, but tokens allow them to exchange incredibly complex thoughts through the simplest of symbols. The way I think about it is with algebra: If A + B = C, the “A” could encapsulate almost anything. But to a computer, what “A” can mean is so much bigger than what that “A” can mean to a person, because computers have no outright limit on processing power.
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“It’s perfectly possible for a special token to mean a very complicated thought,” says Batra. “The reason why humans have this idea of decomposition, breaking ideas into simpler concepts, it’s because we have a limit to cognition.” Computers don’t need to simplify concepts. They have the raw horsepower to process them.
Why We Should Let Bots Gossip
But how could any of this technology actually benefit the world, beyond these theoretical discussions? Would our servers be able to operate more efficiently with bots speaking to one another in shorthand? Could microsecond processes, like algorithmic trading, see some reasonable increase? Chatting with Facebook, and various experts, I couldn’t get a firm answer.
However, as paradoxical as this might sound, we might see big gains in such software better understanding our intent. While two computers speaking their own language might be more opaque, an algorithm predisposed to learn new languages might chew through strange new data we feed it more effectively. For example, one researcher recently tried to teach a neural net to create new colors and name them. It was terrible at it, generating names like Sudden Pine and Clear Paste (that clear paste, by the way, was labeled on a light green). But then they made a simple change to the data they were feeding the machine to train it. They made everything lowercase–because lowercase and uppercase letters were confusing it. Suddenly, the color-creating AI was working, well, pretty well! And for whatever reason, it preferred, and performed better, with RGB values as opposed to other numerical color codes.
Why did these simple data changes matter? Basically, the researcher did a better job at speaking the computer’s language. As one coder put it to me, “Getting the data into a format that makes sense for machine learning is a huge undertaking right now and is more art than science. English is a very convoluted and complicated language and not at all amicable for machine learning.”
[Source Images: Nikiteev_Konstantin/iStock, Zozulinskyi/iStock]
In other words, machines allowed to speak and generate machine languages could somewhat ironically allow us to communicate with (and even control) machines better, simply because they’d be predisposed to have a better understanding of the words we speak.
As one insider at a major AI technology company told me: No, his company wasn’t actively interested in AIs that generated their own custom languages. But if it were, the greatest advantage he imagined was that it could conceivably allow software, apps, and services to learn to speak to each other without human intervention.
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Right now, companies like Apple have to build APIs–basically a software bridge–involving all sorts of standards that other companies need to comply with in order for their products to communicate. However, APIs can take years to develop, and their standards are heavily debated across the industry in decade-long arguments. But software, allowed to freely learn how to communicate with other software, could generate its own shorthands for us. That means our “smart devices” could learn to interoperate, no API required.
Given that our connected age has been a bit of a disappointment, given that the internet of things is mostly a joke, given that it’s no easier to get a document from your Android phone onto your LG TV than it was 10 years ago, maybe there is something to the idea of letting the AIs of our world just talk it out on our behalf. Because our corporations can’t seem to decide on anything. But these adversarial networks? They get things done.
About the author
Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company. He started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day.
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06.19.17
Meet The Guy Behind Design’s Most Cultishly Popular Newsletter
Say hello to Sacha Greif, the humble designer-coder behind the design industry’s daily fix, Sidebar.
Meet The Guy Behind Design’s Most Cultishly Popular Newsletter
By Mark Wilson5 minute Read
With 35,000 subscribers and counting, Sidebar is one of the most important design publications on the planet. It’s just a daily email, linking five stories for you to read each day, but those stories are influential, and to many, serve as a barometer of where design stands today.
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Now Sidebar founder Sacha Greif is launching a redesigned site. Its updates are Spartan, but Sidebar has always been Spartan. Aside from the layout makeover, Greif added deks–publisher speak for summaries–below the headlines of each story. And the design will accommodate up to one job listing a day. It’s Sidebar’s sole revenue driver, aside from occasional sponsored links.
Greif’s monetization efforts are fittingly casual, despite that newsletters have become the dark horse big business for publishers these days. The email newsletter began as a side project. Greif, a Frenchman who lives in Japan, prefers to follow his own passions rather than some prescribed career trajectory and would rather spend his day coding than maximizing his Influencer status in meetups and on social media. (And for the most part, those passions involve the programming framework Meteor, and one he’s in the process of launching now via the new Sidebar, Vulcan.)
With Sidebar’s relaunch, we chatted with Greif about his thoughts on everything from the way we consume media, to how the major players of the Valley have finally reached a reckoning with their own audience.
Co.Design: In 2012, nobody would have thought newsletters would be the force they are today. Why’d you start Sidebar?
Sacha Greif: At the time, I had another project called Folio, which was a marketplace to put designers and clients in touch. I had a really hard time driving traffic to it. Whenever I wrote about code, I could post to Hacker News. But there wasn’t an equivalent for design.
I thought I’d launch Hacker News for design. As for the original project Folio, I gave it away to someone else. So the side project ended up being more.
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Co.Design: Why do you think newsletters have found such a foothold in the age of social media, when things should be easier to find? Co.Design‘s newsletter, for instance, is vital to our daily traffic.
SG: I think it’s the only truly reliable media that exists. With Twitter, you tweet something out, you might miss it. Facebook might change their algorithm. You never know who will see what. Instagram was fairly linear, now they’re using algorithms. As a consumer, if you want to be sure to know about something, email is pretty much the only way.
People are siloed on Facebook, Twitter. They don’t venture out to home pages as much as they used to. I remember, I used to have my daily bookmarks. Every day, I would check out 10 to 15 sites as part of my daily routine. I don’t do that anymore.
Co.Design: What was initial growth like?
SG: It actually took off pretty fast in the beginning. Definitely, getting to 30,000 subscribers was a lot faster than going from 30,000 to 40,000, or however large it is now. In the beginning, it was a new concept, so I saturated my sphere of influence [laughs]. Also maybe I haven’t been as active as I should have been to promote the site. From working on Sidebar, I ended up working on a lot of other side projects. That’s how I operate.
Co.Design: You don’t seem like a big self-promoter! And you obviously monetize Sidebar, but not nearly as aggressively as I’d think a lot of people would.
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SG: I think part of it is due to me being easily distracted. I really enjoy building things, but when it comes to marketing them, and doing all that more pushy advertising and monetization, I get bored pretty fast. I don’t really track analytics. I don’t do A/B testing. There’s a lot of things I know I should be doing but . . .
I find the only way I can motivate myself to improve a project, or Sidebar, is to redesign it. I have a low motivation to go back to work on old code that by now seems all wrong. That’s why I’m launching a new version. I get a chance to give it a new coat of paint.
Co.Design: 2012, the year you launched Sidebar, is coincidentally the same year I started at Co.Design. And I don’t know about you, but for me, the way I evaluate a design has changed entirely over those five years. It’s not just about, “Is this a convenient or beautiful product that solves a real problem?” but about social consequences, dark patterns, the implications to our privacy–things like that.
SG: I think there’s a lot more awareness of these issues now. Especially with the political climate. A simple example: It’s very popular to set up an email sequence when people sign up for your service, and pretend like you’re a real human. But it’s just an automated sequence. I think this sort of thing is going to go away as more and more people are uncomfortable with that ambiguity. It’s kind of like the fake news thing. The first wave, people got duped by it. But there’s a reaction where the people are going to question the validity of sources more, I hope. And the same thing will happen with dark patterns, or even just deceptive practices. A lot of focus will go to questions like, “Is your data really secure?” “Is the company you’re dealing with being truthful?” “Can you explore your data?”
Co.Design: So the consumer is going to push back. They’re going to care more, not just get numb and care less?
SG: Another example is YouTube. There’s so much controversy with ads on violent videos, or Pew Die Pie, and I think it just shows that YouTube and Google weren’t ready to deal with any of that. Same with Facebook. And they don’t have any policies that make sense in place. They’ll do nothing and then they’ll overreact. I think that’s exactly the kind of thing people are, up to now, only a tiny minority of people cared about these issues. Now YouTubers have huge audiences. I don’t think you can treat them the same way. I think it will be the same thing for every big service like this.
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Co.Design: What else is exciting you in design right now? What’s rocking your world?
SG: I’m really excited about all the new design tools like Adobe XD, Figma. Sketch is doing pretty well, Framer. I grew up with Photoshop, and for 10 to 15 years, that was the only thing you had, and nobody ever questioned if you could do something better, and nobody ever wondered why were we using something called ‘Photoshop’ to design websites. Now, I’m glad we’re moving away from that and using tools tailored for web, designing UX, and so on.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
About the author
Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company. He started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day.
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05.31.17
We Studied Brands Around The World. What Consumers Want Isn’t What You Think
We asked more than 5,000 people to tell us about the brands they sought out, then we analyzed what those brands did. The results were surprisingly consistent.
We Studied Brands Around The World. What Consumers Want Isn’t What You Think
[Photo: Afton Almaraz/Getty Images]
By Brian Millar6 minute Read
Traditional advertising went after “share of mind”–the idea was to get you to associate a brand with a single idea, a single emotion. Volvo: safety. Jaguar: speed. Coke: happiness. The Economist: success. Bang, bang, bang, went the ads, hammering the same idea into your mind every time you saw one.
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Advertising briefs evolved to focus the creatives on a single USP and a single message. Tell them we’re the Ultimate Driving Machine. Tell them in a thrilling way. It worked when you saw ads infrequently on television, in a Sunday magazine, or on a billboard on your morning commute.
It hasn’t worked online. Audiences have stopped engaging with advertising. Big brands like Pepsi and P&G have slashed investment in Facebook spending. The agencies’ response has been to create new formats of ads that take over a page, dominate our mobiles’ screens, and generally scream at us. And when somebody screams at you for long enough, you put in earplugs and ignore them. Or, in the case of the online world, you install an ad blocker, as much of the U.K. population has now done.
Yet there are many brands online that people don’t want to block. We asked over 5,000 people around the world to tell us about the brands whose content they actively sought out, then analyzed what those brands did. The results were surprisingly consistent. Popular brands had multifaceted personalities. They could make you laugh, or cheer, or lean forward and take notes. They’d stopped hammering away at a share of mind, and were expanding to achieve a share of emotion.
Some of Victoria’s Secret’s biggest hits have been funny: the hijinx of models on Instagram, blooper reels on YouTube. Taco Bell is beautiful on Instagram, hilarious on Twitter, and inspiring in its online Live Mas campaign. Movember has grown into a global movement on a tiny budget by creating Facebook content that celebrates the glories of mustaches, moves us with cancer survivors’ stories and provides insane moments of slapstick.
So we commissioned a second piece of research to help us understand the emotional landscape of the internet. Forget advertising for a second: What is it that makes the internet so compelling that countries have to pass laws to force us to tear ourselves away from it while driving? Our study showed that there were four kinds of emotionally compelling content: funny, useful, beautiful, and inspiring. When we checked back over the most successful online brands, yup, most of them did all four.
1/5 Men aged 16-24 have a broad range of tastes, reflecting their “snacky” approach to content. They over-index (darker segments) on satirical humor and pop-aesthetics things like manga. [Data: © The EIA 2017]
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Yet most online brands still do only one, as if they’re still appearing on television once a night, rather than following us around as we chat to friends on Facebook, search for inspiration on Pinterest, or scream into the void on Twitter. No wonder engagement is plunging and ad blockers are on the rise.
To increase your share of emotion, and join the ranks of the brands people love online, you need to ask a new set of questions about your audience:
What kinds of things do my audience find funny, useful, beautiful, and inspiring?
Where does my audience go for those kinds of content?
How does my brand produce content that will mesh with more of my audience’s emotional needs?
Take BMW, for example. Our data shows that people with an affinity for the brand-–its core audience–love sensual beauty most of all online. They’re also in the market for laughs, and love parody. They find thrilling things inspiring, hate heartwarming stuff (don’t you love it when the data confirms your prejudices), and have little sense of wonder.
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The good news for BMW is that it’s nailing the “thrilling” genre of inspiring content. The bad news is that “thrilling” represents about 15% of a BMW driver’s emotional life online. Much of the rest of BMW’s content is what we’d categorize as inspiring–TED Talks, designing for the super-future. They’re completely missing the bigger emotional picture.
Jaguar isn’t. The company’s “Good To Be Bad” campaign completely nailed parody, a “blue ocean emotion” for the luxury automotive category. It brought surprise and delight to a rather stuffy brand and forced its audience to reevaluate its range.
You don’t have to be multinational to be multifaceted. Rude Health is a great example of a small U.K. brand that’s grown a cult online following through its unpredictable content. It alternates beautiful food images with racy humor, authoritative rants about the food industry, and inspiring healthy lifestyle tips.
Useful:
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Inspiring:
Beautiful:
Funny:
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Online, being multidimensional beats being single-minded. Surprise beats consistency. Share of emotion beats share of mind. The best online brands have always understood this instinctively. Now we have the data to prove it.
Brian Millar is cofounder of the Emotional Intelligence Agency, an internet data and strategy company.
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05.02.17
22 Movies And Shows Every Designer Should Watch On Netflix
Netflix’s queue is constantly changing. Here’s a guide to the latest stuff.
22 Movies And Shows Every Designer Should Watch On Netflix
By Mark Wilson7 minute Read
(This is an updated version of a list we published two years ago–the majority of which was no longer streamable, given Netflix’s content churn. We miss you, Objectified!)
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The Netflix queue is one of the most dangerous time-sinks on earth. But to designers, it can actually be a great source of inspiration, with everything from design documentaries to films that are pure visual art. Here are 22 must-see design movies and shows on Netflix.
[Photo: Magnolia Pictures]
Iris
In this very watchable, critically acclaimed short documentary, interior designer and round-glasses-loving fashion icon Iris Apfel is profiled by documentary legend Albert Maysles. Even though she’s in her 90s, Apfel still quips, and dresses, better than you do today. [Watch here.]
[Photo: Blinkworks]
Indie Game: The Movie
What’s it like to make a hit video game with a staff of one or two people, taking meetings with Microsoft execs before going back to 12 hours of pixel painting? This very watchable documentary profiles two teams of designers while they created Super Meat Boy and Fez, a couple of the biggest critical and financial indie hits of the past decade, in a high-stakes race to make both deadlines and ends meet. [Watch here.] There’s also a sequel now. [Watch here.]
[Photo: Touchstone Pictures]
The Films Of Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Moonrise Kingdom are both currently available for streaming. Who can ever get enough of the quirky prop magic created by Anderson’s long-time collaborator, Kris Moran? (Not us.) [Watch here and here.]
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
Ai Weiwei is China’s most prominent artist-activist, known for openly challenging the Chinese government (and even being imprisoned for it). The documentary takes you inside his studio, work, and philosophies. [Watch here.]
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[Photo: Exit Through the Gift Shop]
Exit Through The Gift Shop
If you haven’t heard about this “documentary” about graffiti artist Banksy, we’d rather not spill the beans. Come for the street art. Stay (or leave) for the conspiracy theories. [Watch here.]
Metropolis
Yes, it was filmed in 1927. Yes that means it’s silent. But Metropolis is still an amazing piece of architectural sci-fi, set in a dystopian future in which just about everything has gone to crap except for the unbelievable set budgets. It’s hard to believe that the film was made before the advent of computer-generated imagery. Director Fritz Lang relied on tricks like mirrors and miniatures to pull off the film’s special effects. If you can’t take the pace of the movie’s narrative, we won’t judge. Just load it up in the background for a bit of visual splendor. [Watch here.]
[Photo: Happy Movie]
Happy
What makes us happy? Really? This hit documentary by Roko Belic profiles the question by profiling different happy people from around the world, examining the question through spirituality and science. It’s more of a survey of the field than a conclusive or authoritative documentary, but it will leave you with a greater understanding of what is, perhaps, the most important topic in human existence. [Watch here.]
Sky Ladder
Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang likes to blow things up. Sky Ladder is a gorgeously filmed portrait of his work, with a subtle respect for sound that will make you feel the fizzles and booms. [Watch here.]
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Abstract: The Art Of Design
Produced in-house as a Netflix Original, this series is basically Mind of a Chef for designers, which profiles the design elite including starchitect Bjarke Ingels, Nike footwear designer Tinker Hatfield, and Pentagram graphic designer Paula Scher. Critical the series is not. But there’s no better portrait of the place and time of design today than this slickly produced series. [Watch here.]
[Photo: Long Shot Factory]
If You Build It
This inspiring, beloved documentary follows a group of North Carolina high school students as they learn to design and construct a new building for their school. The movie opens with a TED talk about the project itself–so there’s a certain self-aware pat on the back that might make the film cloying to some. But watch a kid build a twisting chicken coop that looks straight out of an architectural biennial, and it’s tough to be too cynical about the power of design thinking. [Watch here.]
[Photo: Untold Creative]
The True Cost
In the era of social media, the fashion industry has gotten faster. Trends go viral, and manufacturers like Zara, Uniqlo, and H&M have responded by transforming from seasonal lines, often planned a year in advance, to clothing that goes from factory to store shelves in a matter of weeks. But there’s a price to all of this surprisingly cheap clothing. This documentary by Andrew Morgan examines fast fashion’s unadvertised sins. [Watch here.]
[Image: Focus Features]
Kubo And The Two Strings
What happens when you combine some of Japan’s most beautiful arts–origami, ink washes, and ukiyo-e wood painting–with stop-motion animation? You get a beautiful movie also happens to be only the second animated film in history to be nominated for an Academy Award in Best Visual Effects. But since it grossed well under $100 million in its 2016 release, barely making back its own budget, there’s a good chance you’ve never seen it. [Watch here.]
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Mind Of A Chef And Chef’s Table
Your friend has told you that you need to watch Mind of a Chef and Chef’s Table 100 times now. Your friend is always right. So if you haven’t partaken in these two series, we guess it’s time to enjoy some of the most beautiful plates of food come together in slow motion–even if the chef-as-genius motif is a bit overplayed. [Watch here and here.]
Encounters at the end of the world
In this Werner Herzog documentary–a filmmaker who has been accused of artfully blending fact and fiction–Herzog takes us to the McMurdo Station in Antarctica, a place of desolate landscapes to explore “the prospect of man’s oblivion.” The visuals contrast between vast, empty spaces and tight quarters where you feel almost too close to the film’s subjects. As with all Herzog’s work, it jumps between the sublime and mundane, the inspirational and the utterly boring. [Watch here.]
Tales By Light
If you’ve ever watched the behind-the-scenes of Planet Earth, you know: The stories behind the photography can be every bit as exciting as the captured moments themselves. Tales by Light is a Netflix Original that profiles nature photographers at work. It’s all a bit meta. You’re watching photographers, getting these amazing photos–all being captured by camera operators, who are getting the amazing video that you’re actually watching of the photographers at work. But if you’ve ever had the fantasy of traveling the globe, camera in hand–well, this series won’t cure it. [ Watch here.]
[Photo: IMDB]
Sneakerheadz
Let us get this out of the way first: Sneakerheadz is not a great documentary. But it’s a superb primer to a cultural movement and big business you may know nothing about. This very hand-holding documentary goes as far to define words like “colorway” before explaining how Run DMC planted the seeds of Adidas’s business strategy today. Critics agree that the film backed off where it should have pushed. Indeed, one of the more interesting subtexts is the evolution of the sneaker market itself–from a hobby that was about originality and discoverability, to one driven by carefully marketed, corporately coordinated “drops” of limited-edition kicks. [Watch here.]
[Photo: Disney and Pixar]
Finding Dory
If you don’t have a child in your life who has forced you to watch Finding Dory–and then watch Finding Dory again–it’s a must-see purely for its visual splendor. In an age when Hollywood computer animation cuts every corner possible, Pixar demonstrates the height of the medium, with an impossibly intricate octopus (the studio’s most complicated character built to date), and scenes that squeeze what must be a thousand or more fish into a single tank. It’s hard to believe there are enough animators in the world to build such a thing. [Watch here.]
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Fresh Dressed
Today, it’s a given that hip-hop culture has influenced the catwalk–Fresh Dressed is a documentary by writer Sacha Jenkins that takes you into the history–for looks at the origins of trends like fat laces and oversized clothing. Plus, interviews with famous faces like Kanye West and Sean Combs keep things moving. [Watch here.]
[Photo: Dogwoof Ltd.]
Dior and I
As Raf Simmons prepares his first couture line for Christian Dior, preeminent fashion documentary director Frédéric Tcheng follows him through the design process with a single camera and seemingly unfettered access. Unlike many design documentaries, which are more promotional than critical, Dior and I reads imperfect and honest–especially in a simple scene in a car, as Simmons provides some seemingly earnest introspection about his own career and how people see him. [Watch here.]
Black Mirror
In 2015, Netflix commissioned its own run of the hit British show Black Mirror, which gives a Twilight Zone twist to technologies of the modern day. By many reports, the series is only getting better over time. And in a world full of social networking, AI, and augmented reality, it’s not just science fiction anymore, either. It’s a demonstration of what the world could become if technology and design choose to consume our world instead of improving it. [Watch here.]
About the author
Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company. He started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day.
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