Design was something that was important to me from the start of this blog, over different incarnations of the blog, I featured interesting design related news. Design is defined as a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, interfaces or other object before it is made.
But none of the definition really talks about what design really is in the way that Dieter Rams principles of good design do. His principles are:
It is innovative
It makes a product useful
It is aesthetic
It makes a product understandable
It is unobtrusive
It is honest
It is long-lasting
It is thorough down to the last detail
It is environmentally-friendly – it can and must maintain its contribution towards protecting and sustaining the environment.
It is as little design as possible
Bitcoin isn’t long lasting as a network, which is why people found the need to fork the blockchain and build other cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin uses 91 terawatts of energy annually or about the entire energy consumption of Finland.
The Bitcoin network relies on thousands of miners running energy intensive machines 24/7 to verify and add transactions to the blockchain. This system is known as “proof-of-work.” Bitcoin’s energy usage depends on how many miners are operating on its network at any given time. – So Bitcoin is environmentally unfriendly by design.
On the other hand, Apple products, which are often claimed to be also influenced by Dieter Rams also fail his principles. They aren’t necessarily environmentally friendly as some like AirPods are impossible to repair or recycle.
Strain wave gearing is described really well in this video.
Strain wave gearing mechanisms are important for a number of reasons:
They are compact transmissions with the potential for extremely high torque.
They allow for realistic, controllable joints, which makes strain wave gears extremely important for robotics.
They are arguably a bigger bottle-neck than physical AI for our robotic and cyborg futures.
Because of their complexity, they have historically only been made by a few companies in standard sizes, which limited the capabilities in robot designs and dictated the bill of materials costs.
Chinese robot maker Unitree seems to have made their own strain wave gears for their own needs, which has allowed them to reduce costs and scale fast.
Building custom multi-layered strain wave gearing allows for exceptionally fine degrees of control and immense torque. Something that software or AI alone won’t provide.
However the fragility and complexity of strain wave gearing impact the current scaling and reliability limits of humanoid robots.
Consumer behaviour
Really interesting documentary on memory, processing and the power of writing. The creator of ColdFusion has made documentaries for Australian public broadcaster ABC.
How a Blacklisted Chinese Tech Giant Kept Buying America’s Best A.I. Chips – The New York Times – Completely legally: Inspur and entities connected to it routed purchase orders through affiliated subsidiaries and third-party resellers whose names never appeared on the blacklist itself, letting racks of cutting-edge hardware flow through channels the Entity List was never built to catch.
I have been thinking a lot about William Gibson recently. Judging by my social feeds, the Neo Tokyo aesthetic has saturated mainstream culture (from 90s anime clips, tech wear, creator built cyber decks and Hong Kong at night) and our Silicon Valley elites sound more like Wintermute at every turn.
The K-shaped economy described by Gary Stevenson in his thesis, feels very much like the have-nots of the sprawl trilogy.
Finally, Apple is on the cusp of releasing a TV adaptation of Gibson’s first novel Neuromancernext year. So I had to post these vintage videos of Gibson as they feel so ‘now’ despite being decades old.
William Gibson talking about cyberpunk as a genre in 1990. He calls a distinctively post-modern fiction genre. In a prophetic turn they talk about the unique way in which cyberpunk has been manifested into the real world; just not in the countercultural way that Gibson envisaged. Although the relationship now between Gibson’s work and the real world are probably too close for comfort. And there is a great interview with Timothy Leary.
Related to that was the cypherpunk movement who realised that cryptography was essential to online worlds.
Cypherpunks were concerned about the government a quarter century before the Edward Snowden leaks and the algorithmic web with a web of data for sale to advertisers and bad actors.
And in this clip, William Gibson contextualises the early web in this interview
30 Years of Micro Motors to Robot Dexterous Hands: MINDSYNC TECH and Jiangsu Leili Solve the Mechanical Stiffness Problem in Humanoid Gripping – interesting article in Pandaily. It’s basically smaller sizes of strain wave gears. Back when I went to the launch of Automata’s EVA robotic arm launch, strain wave gears came up as a topic of conversation. Robotic precision focused on software because only standardised strain wave gears were available from a limited amount of suppliers like Harmonic Drive. The Chinese seem to have sidestepped this innovation pinch point with powered strain wave gears small enough to operate a robotic hand with a high degree of dexterity.
Gadgets
Open Source Vacuum Avoids Cloud | Hackaday – thanks to open source software, a Raspberry Pi board, off the shelf parts and accessible additive manufacturing there is now an open source Roomba style vacuum cleaner.
ChinAI #366: Most Companion Robots Die by Day 30 – model capabilities will become increasingly cheap, while scenario-specific evaluation datasets will become increasingly expensive. Most companion products will not die because their AI models lack power, but because users stop opening the app by Day 30.
Doubling down on manufacturing at its EV hub in Hefei, China as part of what Blume describes as an “in China for China” approach.
Exporting the cars it produces in China, in Blume’s own words, to Southeast Asia, Australia, India, South America, Africa and Europe, in what looks more like an “in China for the world” strategy (minus the US market).
Pursuing mass layoffs in Germany, while luring Chinese carmakers into the German factories that Volkswagen is struggling to sustain.
Urging the EU to accelerate and broaden its trade defense measures against Chinese competitors that are seizing market share for plug-in hybrids at an astonishing rate.
Russia’s Newest Kh-101 Cruise Missile Upgrade Points to Chinese Help | Wes O’Donnell – the recent upgrade to Russia’s Kh-101 missile capabilities owes far less to stolen Western secrets than it does to Chinese industrial hardware. Whilst espionage may have ironed out a few technical creases, Russia is quietly acquiring the machine tools and microelectronics from Chinese suppliers. These are needed to turn a dormant Soviet-era innovation into a mass-produced reality.
The rationale for putting such high-spec, durable components like single-crystal engine blades into a single-use weapon comes down to a recent design trade-off. Having substantially increased the missile’s warhead size at the expense of its fuel capacity, Russian engineers required a hotter, vastly more efficient engine to recoup the lost flight range. Manufacturing equipment sourced from Chinese vendors provided the industrial “kitchen” necessary to make this crucial engineering workaround a reality.
The 6 wildest claims in Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI | The Verge – OpenAI allegedly “coached” Apple employees on how to bypass security measures. Apple alleged Tan kept an internal document that outlines employee off-boarding procedures. OpenAI allegedly used this information to warn employees coming from Apple about the company’s security checks and “coached” them on how to avoid it.
OpenAI advised departing Apple workers not to disclose their new employer and also offered tips on how to avoid a “dreaded walk out,” which would result in their immediate removal from the company, preventing them from accessing Apple’s systems for a standard two weeks, the lawsuit alleges. OpenAI is accused of telling Apple employees not to “sign anything at the exit interview,” and if they’re asked to sign a document, to tell OpenAI “asap.”
In the lawsuit, Apple says that OpenAI’s alleged tactics “appear to be having their desired effect.” Apple claims it has noticed “a recent trend of employees who are leaving Apple for OpenAI and taking steps to evade security measures,” including workers “ignoring outreach by security personnel to schedule exit processes and security reviews.”
Secondly there is a need in Chinese culture for events to be bustling with people. I remember going to the China South City wholesale mall in the Shenzhen region. Some of the car park was converted into basketball courts so that there would be the sound of people there, even if they were having fun rather than purchasing supplies for their business.
The problem for Rolex got much worse when this story breached beyond the Chinese internet into the feeds of western watch enthusiasts.
In 2024, Oracle made a $6.5 billion deal to build an data centre complex in Malaysia from which it could supply computing power to ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, and other foreign companies. Oracle’s facility in Malaysia was soon on track to become the second-biggest in the world, providing by one estimate more than one-fifth of China’s total A.I. computing power. Ellison is now powering the A.I. ambitions of China aka America’s biggest geopolitical rival.
Cybersecurity expert Steve Sims discusses how hackers are now using AI.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp says ‘something has gone completely wrong’ with how AI is sold | CNBC – Palantir CEO Alex Karp caused a stir by discussing what he says is growing unhappiness among U.S. businesses about the costs to access models from the biggest AI companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic. And he asserted that those customers are getting “no value” from the technology.
Axios AI+ |⛽ Trading compute – 1 big thing: Wall Street wants to trade AI compute like oil. This reminded me a lot of Enron’s doomed attempt to trade bandwidth in a similar way, which was the core offering of Enron Broadband Services.
Welcome to the 34th edition of my newsletter. This issue sees me writing this from my parent’s home in the North West of England. It’s also part of the reason why this has been published later than usual.
The change of pace in Granadaland in comparison to London was noteworthy. In bingo lingo 34 would be ‘ask for more’ – which seems to be very much on the zeitgeist at the moment. There is a general zeitgeist of dissatisfaction in the UK,
In Chinese 34, is considered an unlucky number as 4 sounds similar to the word for death and similar in nature to the number 13 in western cultures.
For this edition’s soundtrack, I went back to move forward with a mix by the late great Larry Levan playing at End Max, Tokyo in 1991. By this time the famous DJ had become a long term heroin addict and had complications due to his drug use and HIV; yet you wouldn’t know it from this set, he died the following November.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
An analysis of Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings to try and understand what was happening beneath the big numbers in a febrile time.
From AI shamans, the Ulm School of Design, an AI reckoning and everything in between.
The 2026 World Cup marketing kick-offs and a bunch more things.
ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings tells a far more nuanced story than the top-line numbers.
High end shopping hauls are becoming a cultural phenomenon. Chanel is no longer just behind a velvet rope; but may erode brand equity
Publicis Groupe’s acquisition of LiveRamp and the move to orchestrating enterprise data
How the FT thinks marketing is being shaped by AI from production to consumer behaviour.
I worked on a few sports partnerships activation whilst embedded at Google Cloud and an F1 sports partnership at a freelance engagement more recently. So my attention was immediately grabbed by this collection of research from Ipsos on sports partnerships. It shows the need for long ongoing sports partnerships and the power of a brand sponsor that is highly aligned with the sport and the team.
Nigo at the Design Museum
Nigo is a natural subject for a museum as he has assiduously curated his own life. What particularly impressed me about the Design Museum exhibition was how it made clear that Nigo’s work was a continuation of the earlier work done by the people behind Major Force and File Records: Hiroshi Fujiwara, Takagi Kan, Gota Yashiki and Toshio Nakanishi.
The Major Force crew weren’t just musicians, DJs and producers; but designers and cultural commentators with columns in Japanese magazines.
Even the name Nigo came from people in Tokyo clubs calling Tomoaki Nagao ‘Hiroshi Fujiwara Ni-go’ aka Hiroshi Fujiwara number 2.
When Fujiwara and co. finished their Last Orgy culture column in Takarajima magazine and the spin-off late night TV show, Nigo got their blessing and wrote Last Orgy 2 continuing on in Popeye magazine.
Fujiwara helped fund Nigo’s expansion into retail with the Nowhere boutique, which was the foundation for A Bathing Ape and Jun Takahashi’s Undercover. More on this here, and more on the exhibition at The Design Museum here.
Chart of the month.
Ipsos looked at fans who had differing levels of fandom for a premier league football team and partner brands with different levels of brand fit with the game. Prompted recall was measured over the 2020/21 football season. While the levels changed, there was a clear correlation between the level of brand fit and degree of fandom and prompted brand recall.
Things I have watched.
I watched the rest of the original OSS 117 series of films that I didn’t watch last month. This moved the action to Tokyo and Brazil.
OSS 117 Mission For A Killer
OSS 1167 Mission to Tokyo
OSS 117 Double Agent
Mission For A Killer saw Frederick Stafford take over the role of OSS 117, if you are a classic film you might recognise him from the Alfred Hitchcock film Topaz. Mission to Tokyo was the acme of the series, and a wonderful cinematic capture of the Japanese post-war economic miracle. The final film Double Agent had John Gavin take on the mantle. By which time the franchise felt like a poorer version of Hollywood, Gavin himself was a competent actor, but the creative spark in the franchise was gone. Instead it became part of a sea of sameness in western espionage cinema.
I can understand why there was a major reset, when Michel Hazanavicius rebooted the franchise. He had rich material to work with, from disclosures on what was going on with Jacques Foccart running economic sabotage, deniable military networks and regime change in the Francophone region. Even the private sector were involved, Elf the petroleum giant servicing as a covert slush fund and instrument of foreign policy as France decolonised. The scandal only broke over in the 1990s.
I got to see The Mandalorian and Grogu. It’s a good but flawed film. I got into The Mandalorian, not as a Star Wars devotee, but having a deep appreciation for the spaghetti westerns and the chambara films that it subtly drew from.
The film plugs a gap in the Star Wars franchise in the cinema, so expectations were high for Star Wars fans. What you get is spectacle, an experience that would feel at home in a Disney park. So it’s entertaining. The bad points in my opinion are down to a loose plot points, having an actress of the quality of Sigourney Weaver and not using her properly.
What put salt in the wound was the trouble put into scenes that pay clumsy homage to Ray Harryhausen and Francis Ford Coppola respectively. Putting the same effort with less money into tightening up the script would have paid dividends. Maybe Disney didn’t care so long as the space was filled.
I guess the moral of the story is don’t watch this film with a cinephile.
Useful tools.
I have been a big fan of Parcel for a while, but didn’t realise until I listened to a John Gruber podcast episode that it now allows you to track Amazon deliveries as well. Given that I work from home a lot having this app makes like a lot easier to manage package deliveries.
The sales pitch.
I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.
With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors from narratives, creative platforms and new business pitches to sports partnerships.
My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.
The Strategic Toolkit:
Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Arm Holdings), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Personal Care, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.
Ok this is the end of this newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the sun when you can, don’t linger on the next long weekend being at the end of August.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.
AI reckoning as a term is a rather stark warning. Even more so when it comes from Aswath Damodaran who is a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at NYU (New York University).
The reckoning that Damodaran is concerned about is a ‘Minsky moment‘ and represents a stark contrast to the boundless techno-optimism of Marc Andreessen.
The AI reckoning wasn’t on the mind of investors who bought into Cerebras Systems.
Cerebras Systems makes wafer sized chips with memory and processing on the same die. This reduces latency and increases speed. As cool as Cerebras Systems technology is, the company currently has sales of $510 million and was valued on its opening day of trading at $71 billion.
AI-Powered Cyberattacks | Robert Scoble and A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future | The Economist – A few years ago a participant used the conference network to hack a water-treatment facility in America (Messrs Wyler and Stump are cagey about the details). Another hid behind the din of legitimate hacker traffic to attack government websites and payment systems. The noc team traced him, sent him a message reminding him that doing illegal things from Black Hat was still illegal, then watched him close his laptop and walk away. Hackers on the other side of the world try their luck too. When the registration server was switched on, attacks began at once, including traffic that appeared to originate in Romania….Mr Stump says the noc has seen a pattern across multiple Black Hat conferences in which Taiwanese participants show up with hacked devices. “Most of [the traffic] goes back to China,” he says. ai-powered attacks by nation-states or cybercriminals are likely to intensify.. The team thinks the ai race is only beginning. For Mr Wyler, the vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos, including some that have gone undetected for decades, are to be welcomed rather than feared. “We now know they’re there.” All the same, cautions Mr Stump, the next two years will be turbulent, as more flaws will be uncovered; more breaches will occur as firms feed sensitive data into ai systems; and more insecure code will be written.
I am not a football fan, but I recognise the power that the 2026 World Cup has to move hearts and minds. This year it’s being hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States. The 2026 World Cup fan experience is shrouded in uncertainty.
https://flic.kr/p/2aqzM1j
I found it interesting that both adidas with the launch of its match ball and Panini with the launch of its sticker book both marked the start of the countdown to the 2026 World Cup season.
Chinese countryside’s quieter strains – by Yuxuan JIA – Decades of son preference have left villages full of unmarried men, driving bride prices higher and sustaining a shadow market for “Vietnamese brides” that can slide into fraud, coercion, and trafficking. Young people, especially young women, are drifting away from rural patriarchy and the obligation-heavy world of kinship and “face”, while the influencer economy and short-video apps offer fantasies of easy money to teenagers with weak school prospects.
Why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men | Washington Post – “I don’t want to be too disparaging about them because they’re our Christian brothers and sisters, but worshiping in a big former supermarket with dry ice machines and a pop band, it’s not really traditional Christianity,” Father Longenecker said. His new parishioners are attracted to “very traditional worship with lots of incense and altar boys and sacred music in the traditional style.”
More NatSec | Big Lychee, Various Sectors – From the government’s press release… Safeguarding national security is a continuous endeavour with no end point. At its core this sounds like the Stalin derived Maoist principle of struggle. National security ‘enemies’ like Jimmy Lai, Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho serve the same purpose as George Orwell’s character Emmanuel Goldstein in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ever-tightening system is allegedly concerned with leaderless lone wolves, small cells and external actors – but the reality is just control in Orwell’s novel.
Revising Hong Kong’s Past – Lingua Sinica – Among the changes noted was a complete erasure of references to the Tiananmen Massacre, which was recast as “political turmoil in the late spring and early summer of 1989.” Gone from the exhibit entirely, the Ming Pao reported, is a previous image that showed one million Hong Kongers taking to the streets in 1989 in support of the demonstrators in China.
I am skeptical about ‘gurus’. However, I found this Tony Robbins video good for getting out of a period of ‘stuckness’ in my thinking. Robbin’s ideas about priming, in particular they way he links physical activity to mental exercises works and has a good deal of neuroscience behind it.
Japan loses its thirst for vending machines | FT – Tens of thousands of vending machines are vanishing from Japan, as machines that once symbolised the nation’s love of innovation are shunned in a climate of rising inflation and deepening labour shortages.
The nation’s stock of 2.2mn drinks vending machines is down 23 per cent from its bubble-era peak in 1985, according to the Japan Vending System Manufacturers Association.
The faltering economics of running a national vending machine empire were exposed when DyDo, Japan’s third biggest operator, this month said it would scrap almost 7.5 per cent of its network of 270,000 units after posting its largest ever annual loss. – what surprised me was that the vending machines weren’t digitised.
Why do men love Stone Island | FT – “Football in the late 1980s and 1990s was a heavily policed environment under surveillance, where visibility carried risk,” says Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster. “On the terraces, clothing wasn’t decoration, it was risk management. Stone Island mattered because its garments were already structured around concealment, modulation and elective visibility. The detachable badge, reversible constructions, modular hoods and certain fabric treatments enabled wearers to calibrate how legible they were, depending on context. Football casuals were not simply performing taste; they were managing recognition.”
Apple rolls out UK age checks for iPhone users | FT – interesting move, I did notice that it assumed my account was adult due to the length it had been held. It reminded me of friends who registered email addresses, domain names and even social media handles for their newly born children – and did just enough to keep the accounts alive.
The 49MB Web Page | thatshubham – Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user’s cross-site identity together across different ad networks.
When you open a website on your phone, it’s like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.
Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is Europe’s IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles through your pockets.
So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the background
The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.
Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.
A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future | The Economist – A few years ago a participant used the conference network to hack a water-treatment facility in America (Messrs Wyler and Stump are cagey about the details). Another hid behind the din of legitimate hacker traffic to attack government websites and payment systems. The noc team traced him, sent him a message reminding him that doing illegal things from Black Hat was still illegal, then watched him close his laptop and walk away. Hackers on the other side of the world try their luck too. When the registration server was switched on, attacks began at once, including traffic that appeared to originate in Romania….
Mr Stump says the noc has seen a pattern across multiple Black Hat conferences in which Taiwanese participants show up with hacked devices. “Most of [the traffic] goes back to China,” he says. ai-powered attacks by nation-states or cybercriminals are likely to intensify… The team thinks the ai race is only beginning. For Mr Wyler, the vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos, including some that have gone undetected for decades, are to be welcomed rather than feared. “We now know they’re there.”
All the same, cautions Mr Stump, the next two years will be turbulent, as more flaws will be uncovered; more breaches will occur as firms feed sensitive data into ai systems; and more insecure code will be written.
OpenAI acquires popular tech talk show for ‘low hundreds of millions’ | FT – ChatGPT-maker moves into broadcasting with deal for TBPN after it had pledged to abandon ‘side-quests’ – I think that this is trying to balance the narrative with Anthropic which is ripping ahead. In past decades you would have dumped a lot of money into a campaign run by a PR agency, but time moves on
New Internet of Things Plan Targets Global Infrastructure – Jamestown – A new action plan for the Internet of Things (IoT) increases the possibility that Chinese-built connected infrastructure in the United States could become a platform for data access, cyber pre-positioning, and attacks on U.S. cyber-physical systems in a prolonged crisis or confrontation. The plan, launched jointly by nine ministries, defines IoT as a total cyber-physical environment that links “people, machines, and things” across sensing, networks, platforms, applications, and security, and sets targets for 10 billion terminal connections, more than 50 standards, and deployment across production, consumption, and governance. The plan indicates Beijing is moving from connected devices to connected backbone systems. It reinforces the new Five-Year Plan, suggesting that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to supply not only endpoints like sensors, appliances, and vehicles but also the next generation of AI, computing, and space-ground communications infrastructure that will underpin them.
