Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Asher Levine wants to make sure you never lose a piece of clothing he designed. Last week, the 24-year-old fashion world darling (he’s dressed Lady Gaga, which seems to be the benchmark for that descriptor) unveiled a Fall/Winter 2013 collection that included garments embedded with Bluetooth-enabled microchips.

In a demonstration in front of a packed Fashion Week house, Levine showed how an iPhone app will allow the wearer to press a button and make their garments “ring.” If the lost item isn’t nearby, the app will locate it in Google Maps. The thin microchip–which fits easily in the palm of your hand–will be sewn into compartments in gloves, coats, and hats from Levine’s spring collection.

But Levine didn’t design the chips himself–rather, they’re being built by a company called Phone Halo. Halo’s flagship product, a Bluetooth-connected wallet called TrackR, has raised over $25,000 more than their goal on Indiegogo (there are five days left). The company’s mission is admirably simple: Help people stop losing stuff. The collaboration with Levine was part of their strategy to expand from wallets into personal belongings in general. “We believe that fashion will have more and more technology integration,” Phone Halo’s COO, Christian Smith, said over email. “Asher’s smart gloves are a great example of how tech-fashion can improve our lives.”

Of course, TrackR can only help you see where your belongings are at the moment. Getting them back–particularly if they’ve been stolen–is another matter. If you look at other objects people track using GPS (bikes or computers, for example), you’ll find that it takes a certain amount of dedication to personally accost a thief. It remains to be seen whether Levine’s market–of people who can routinely afford bags that cost more than a few thousand dollars–is the appropriate target demographic for such a technology. It’s easy to imagine using TrackR to locate a misplaced hat at a party; it’s harder to imagine tracking down a stolen bag across town.

That distinction aside, it’s interesting to watch fashion designers dipping their toes into the pool of ubiquitous computing. And for Levine, the Phone Halo collaboration is just the latest in a series of tech-friendly projects. During his Fall/Winter 2012 Fashion Week presentation, an on-stage MakerBot Replicator 3-D printed eyewear for his models.

Nike released its Nike+ FuelBand to the public a year ago this month. If you’re unfamiliar with the product, it fits around a user’s wrist and provides one common tracking metric for any sort of physical activity.

The FuelBand builds on Nike+, a shoe-embedded energy-tracking product the company launched for runners in 2006 and has since expanded to basketball. The FuelBand measures activity in what it calls NikeFuel points using oxygen kinetics, which it says is a better method of measurement than simply counting steps. The device also tracks steps and calories, but fuel points let users compare different sports and activities — a basketball game vs. a dance class vs. a yoga session vs. a long walk, for example.

To mark the FuelBand’s one-year anniversary, Nike shared some data with us to show just how active its users have become. The company would not say how many people use the FuelBand as a whole, but the overall Nike+ community is more than 11 million strong.

Fuel points are a proprietary unit of measurement with plenty of secret sauce involved and this data comes directly from Nike, so take it with a grain of salt. But it’s fun to consider nonetheless, so here’s what the company shared with us.

Since FuelBand was introduced a year ago, users have earned more than 409 billion total fuel points. That translates to enough energy for one person to run 44.1 million marathons. Not all FuelBand users are created equal, however. The most active 1% accounts for just over 21% of total fuel points earned.

Today NikeFuel users earn more than 1 billion points each day. Converted to electricity, all that energy would be enough to power 6,772 houses daily, Nike says.

Forget solar power; imagine the human-powered house. Now there’s a thought.

Have you tried the Nike FuelBand? What do you think of it? Let us know in the comments.

Thumbnail image courtesy Nike

If you’re like millions of Americans looking for a job right now, it might be time to take a step back and evaluate your job-search tactics. There are some common mistakes that can make you your own worst enemy when trying to get your foot in the door of a new employer. To give your employment search some performance enhancement, make sure to follow these tips.

1. Early Bird Gets the Worm

The sooner you get your job application in, the better luck you will have at getting your resume seen. If you are slow to reply to a job listing, you likely will lose your shot at be considered, so make sure to stay up-to-date on new listings as they arise.

2. Get a Jump-Start

Even better than being one of the first to apply for an open position is seeking one out before it is posted. Research the companies you are interested in working for and reach out to see if any openings are on the horizon. Interact with the company on LinkedIn, join the same local trade organizations the company attends and find out where their staff members might be speaking publicly. Consider volunteering at events the company may be involved with to start to get to know the staff and familiarize yourself with the company culture.

3. Tailor Your Information

Applying for jobs can often be a numbers game, so once you have narrowed down the best fits for you, make sure you customize your resume and cover letter for each position you apply for. Though you will want to be one of the first to apply, don’t be in such a rush that you automatically eliminate yourself by not indicating how your skills are a match for a specific position and how you meet that particular’s company’s requirements. Not showing you are a fit for that specific job will surely end your chances of being considered.

4. Follow Up

Though it may feel like you are sending your information into a large black abyss at times, there are people on the other end. It’s perfectly acceptable — even preferred — to send a follow-up email if you don’t get a response within a couple of days. This is when you confirm that the interviewer received your information, giving you a chance to reiterate your interest in the job. But, if a listing specifically states “no phone calls or emails,” abide by that request or you may end your chances. Once you have landed the interview, absolutely follow up with your interviewers through a thank-you note, again expressing your interest in the company and the job.

If you feel like your job search is at a standstill, be sure to reevaluate how you are going about it. After all, we all could use a little performance enhancement from time to time.

Wow that is small! Hope it works!

Two tiny satellites billed as the world’s smallest space telescopes will launch into orbit Monday (Feb. 25) on a mission to study the brightest stars in the night sky.

The Bright Target Explorer (BRITE) nanosatellites look like little cubes and will blast off atop an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) at 7:20 a.m. EST (1220 GMT) on Monday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India.

While tiny nanosatellites have launched into space before, they have been mainly used to study Earth or test new spaceflight technologies. But the BRITE satellites will be the first spacecraft of their small stature to peer into the cosmos, their builders say.

The diminutive spacecraft are less than 8 inches wide and weigh less than 15.5 pounds.

The diminutive spacecraft are less than 8 inches wide and weigh less than 15.5 pounds. Once in orbit, they are expected to observe the brightest stars (from Earth’s perspective), including those that make up well-known constellations such as Orion, the Hunter.

“BRITE is expected to demonstrate that nanosatellites are now capable of performance that was once thought impossible for such small spacecraft,” said Cordell Grant, manager of satellite systems for the Space Flight Laboratory at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), where the satellites were designed.

One of the BRITE satellites launching Monday was designed and built at the Space Flight Laboratory. The other was designed by the center, but assembled in Austria, university officials said in a statement. They are two of seven satellites set to blast off with India’s rocket launch on Monday.

The nanosatellites can only fit small telescopes, so they won’t be capturing amazing high-resolution images of the cosmos, Grant explained in the statement. But they will be able to observe and record changes in a star’s brightness over time. Such observations could help scientists find spots on the star, an orbiting planet or secondary star, or “starquakes” caused by oscillations within the star itself.

The nanosatellites can monitor their target stars from any orbit — they just need to be above the atmosphere to avoid the twinkling, or scintillating effect, that overwhelms stars’ relatively small changes in brightness, researchers said.

The two BRITE satellites launching Monday are designed to be the first wave of a planned constellation of six space telescopes to study the brightest stars in the night sky, UTIAS officials said. In all, the six-spacecraft constellation will include two Austrian nanosatellites, a pair from Poland and a pair provided by Canada.

By keeping the satellites small, they can be built faster and at a lower cost than their larger counterparts, and be launched as a piggyback payload on rockets carrying larger spacecraft, UTIAS officials said.

“A nanosatellite can take anywhere from six months to a few years to develop and test, but we typically aim for two years or less,” Grant said.

Photos courtesy Defense Media Network

It all began as a “purely creative exercise.” “My freelance work had dried up, and I needed to keep myself busy. I wasn’t trying to capture the interest of a certain market. I simply wanted to try my hand at branding something that had a lot of components, that had a deep heritage and that I felt had practical use.”

Click to enlarge.

That’s Tyler Deep. Not so long ago, he put a $15 deck of cards up on Kickstarter, hoping to accrue the $6,000 to send them into production. What happened instead was one of those dreams Kickstarter is made of–4,000 backers showed up out of nowhere, pledging $146,000 to support the project. “I never thought people would care this much. . .not in a 100 years,” he says today. “I am floating in a sea of amazement.”

It wasn’t just any old deck of cards, of course. With a creative-sabbatical approach, Deep crafted his deck from top to bottom, designing every aspect, from the illustrations of royalty to his own font-like riff on the traditional hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds. The effect is borderline antique without feeling retro, like a one-off deck built for a high-stakes poker game in some Hollywood period piece.

Now in their second printing, this edition of cards will feature metallic gold backs, and they’ll reside in a bold red box that’s printed with gold foil highlights. Red and gold–it’s an incestuous duo of royal opulence that will make your imported clay poker chips look cheap. And should you prefer to look more Wayne than Lannister, the deck will also be available in black.

Subway stations are great places for art, commissioned or otherwise. The anxieties of a bustling platform, the boredom of waiting for a delayed train, or even the drudgery of another day’s commute–all can be soothed, or at least temporarily smoothed over, by a well-placed placard with something nice to look at. Renowned artist Mark Wallinger recently finished a new collection of soon-to-be-subterranean pieces to celebrate the London Underground’s 150th anniversary, though their subject matter is somewhat at odds with the whole idea behind these modern marvels of efficiency in the first place. By the end of this summer, at every one of London’s 270 Tube stations, passengers will be able to take a few seconds to contemplate a tiny maze.

The project is part of the ongoing Art on the Underground program, and it’s the largest-ever commission of its kind. For the full set, Wallinger created 270 different labyrinths, one for every stop. The first 10 of the series are being installed this week; the rest will follow in coming months. Once they’re up, each two-foot-by-two-foot piece will be a permanent part of the station in which it’s posted.

“The journeys we take on the Underground are unique to each of us,” Wallinger said in a statement accompanying the project’s debut. “I hope Labyrinth can perhaps reflect that individual yet universal experience.” And in a sense, the maze is the perfect thing to capture that dynamic. Each will be instantly recognizable as such–like the ones you’ll find in any kids’ activity book, they’re nothing more than ordered clusters of black and white lines–though every passerby will have the opportunity to navigate the lines on their own, be it superficially, from a distance, or up-close, scrupulously following their path with a finger.

From the initial pieces, it seems like some will be easier to complete than others. The puzzle for Embankment station is a straightforward spiral to the center. The thin-lined Oxford Circus labyrinth offers a significantly greater challenge, with some potential wrong turns and dead ends thrown into the mix. But for all the pieces, the magic only exists so long as the works stay pristine. Hopefully, the city’s transportation officials have a plan for dealing with the inevitable product of the first drunken ass who happens to encounter one of these with a Sharpie.

How often has some version of this story happened:

A group of young, eager innovators come together to develop a new, promising approach to one of today’s “wicked problems” in an area like climate change, poverty alleviation, food security, or off-grid energy.

With a mix of design and engineering prowess, good intentions and no small amount of luck, they develop a laudable prototype. This wins them breathless media attention, speaking invitations to conferences and perhaps a prize or two, followed by sufficient seed capital for a pilot.

The pilot shows promise; after the intervention, the relevant critical indicator (which might be a measure of market access, public health, etc.) shows marked improvement. On the strength of this happy outcome, more capital is raised. The intervention moves out of the pilot stage and is rolled out to the community. The press is breathless. Hopes are high.

And then, much to everyone’s chagrin: almost nothing changes. The new social innovation barely makes a dent in the problem, which appears more pernicious than ever.

What happened?

If you recognize elements of this story (or if you wince in self-recognition) you are not alone. This is the common fate of most social innovations, and it’s the field’s dirty little secret: many of the most promising new approaches to tough problems fail, in ways that surprise and frustrate their creators, funders, and constituents alike.

Wicked problems have earned that moniker for a reason.

The reasons behind such failures are complex. The most common culprit is a kind of cultural blindness on the part of would-be change agents, who fail to design “with, not for” the communities they serve, and end up trying to impose a solution from without, rather than encourage its adoption from within. More generally, it’s important to remember that wicked problems have earned that moniker for a reason–they are generally immune to “elegant hacks” and quick fixes that can be a hallmark of other endeavors, such as software development.

But there are other, deeper reasons why social innovations unexpectedly fail. They involve the many ways we unintentionally mismeasure the impact we’re having, and fool ourselves that a social intervention is working when it really isn’t.

The most common pitfall we encounter in measuring the impact a social innovation is failing to establish a control group. Without assessing a matched cohort that is not receiving an intervention, it is impossible to know what precise effect a social innovation is having.

We unintentionally mismeasure the impact we’re having, and fool ourselves that a social intervention is working.

For example, let’s say you develop an innovative literacy-improving program for children. You test a community of low-literacy subjects, then provide the intervention, and test them again. Their measured rates of literacy jump dramatically. Time to pop the champagne corks, right?

Wait a moment. Why exactly did rates of literacy improve? Was it your program? Or was it a natural byproduct of the maturation of the subjects? (Between the first and second tests, the children you tested got older–their independent cognitive development may account for the increase.) Or was it a practice effect of the test? After all, we tend to do better on tasks we’ve tried before. It might be the case that subjects simply got better because they’d seen this kind of test before.

Then again, perhaps we have run into a regression effect. These require a bit of additional explanation.

Many phenomena, like the temperature in a given month, or your bowling score, will cluster around an average. On some days, it may be moderately higher, on others moderately lower. But on average, these indicators will cluster around a central number, a “mean.”

Now, let’s imagine we take a group of subjects and give them a test, such as the baseline literacy test mentioned above. As with the examples above, most will score close to the mean, while a few will be outliers, scoring dramatically higher or lower. Given the same test again, with no additional intervention, its likely that the subjects who were outliers in the first test will “migrate” closer to the mean, while some that were at the mean in the first test will “migrate” to the extreme high or low of the range in the second. This is a purely natural statistical artifact.

Placebo effects happen in social interventions just as they do in medicine.

Now let’s temporarily assume, for the sake of argument, that the hypothetical literacy program we devised had an astonishing 0% effectiveness. We measure the baseline of the population; then we deliver this (useless) intervention; and then measure again, paying careful attention to those who did the worst on the first test. Amazingly, many will show marked improvement, “migrating” to the middle of the pack, though for reasons that have nothing to do with our literacy program.

Even controlling for regression effects, there may be other phantoms lurking in our measurement. Placebo effects happen in social interventions just as they do in medicine. Some people who believe they’ve received an effective intervention may do better whether the intervention is actually effective or not.

Much more common, particularly in measuring social innovation initiatives is the problem of selective dropout. This occurs when the “users” of a particular intervention find it either too easy or too difficult, and stop participating. When that happens, the results of any subsequent analysis can be markedly skewed. Perhaps its true that the average literacy rates of a particular classroom of students improved by 20% after the administration of our program, but it’s meaningless if 20% of the students found it too difficult and left the class altogether.

The inverse problem–a form of priming–is particularly common in social innovation and makes measurement difficult. This occurs when the measurement of an intervention suggest–often subconsciously–what the “right” answers should be.

Finally, there are compensation effects that can occur when we change a social system. When we make cars safer, people may drive more dangerously, precisely because we made driving less dangerous. When we make cookstoves more efficient (and therefore more healthy and less polluting to use) people may use them more, offsetting the benefits of the efficiency.

All of these biases–sample maturation, practice effects, regression artifacts, placebo and compensation effects, and countless others–can dramatically distort the perceived success of a particular intervention, often making it look much more effective than it actually is.

Does this mean we should just throw in the towel? Hardly. Social science and fields like medical research are replete with tools for designing effective impact measurement. Data scientists and information economists in particular are beginning to pair with social innovators to understand the dynamics of interventions, and separate what works from what doesn’t. Technologists are uncovering new ways to aggregate core impact data and make it open. Yet this work has little bearing on the kind of impact statements demanded by many funders today.

What we need now is a revolution in both the practice and culture of social innovation, one that recognizes that meaningful measurement is every bit as essential–and artful–as the interventions themselves, and bakes it in as a core component of the work. Otherwise, we may very well be wasting everyone’s time.

El Anatsui, the artist behind more than 30 works at Brooklyn Museum this month, will knock the wind out of you. There are two ways in which this will happen; you’ll be stunned either by the shimmering, monumental beauty of the work or the weighty historical narrative that blasts through Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui. Or both.

Anatsui–who is Ghana-born but Nigeria-based–is that rare kind of artist whose work is both beautiful and critical, ornate and intellectual. He is best known for his hanging sculptures made out of bottle and can tops he collects from around Nsukka, pieced and patched together by a group of workers in his local studio. These are “non-fixed forms,” meaning that the jingly aluminum sheets are transported to the gallery in a suitcase and hung according to the whims of the curator. Each time a piece is shown, it looks different, folds in novel ways, and reflects thousands of light points in new ways. “I don’t believe in artworks being things that are fixed,” Anatsui says. “You know, the artist is not a dictator.”

After building a successful career based on appropriating local Kente cloth symbology (and, for a time, sculpting with a chainsaw), Anatsui started collecting liquor bottle caps in the 1980s. The caps–which come from local Nigerian distilleries–offered him what The New York Times calls “a locally made, in ready supply and culturally loaded” material. Rum, you see, is a by-product of the slave trade. The triangle of trade between Africa, the Caribbean, and the colonial powers went like this: Europeans bartered for slaves using manufactured goods. Then, the slaves would be sent to the New World in exchange for sugar (and other raw goods). In the Americas, the sugar was turned into rum, which went back to Europe to fund another round of the cycle. Soon, distilleries popped up along the Gold Coast, including Nigeria.

Colonialism asserts itself in subtle and obvious ways, both in the names of the liquor brands (Dark Sailor, Chelsea) and in the titles of the works themselves. In Drifting Continents (2009), eight luminant, gold textiles hang on the gallery wall, connected by a single continuous thread of colorful tops. Other works address problems within Nigeria and Africa itself, like the towering Waste Paper Bags, a standing sculpture made from discarded commercial printing plates. As the curators point out, the plates look a lot like a loaded symbol of Nigerian-Ghanian conflict. “The forms resemble large woven bags that became known as ‘Ghana-must-go’ bags in the early 1980s, when Nigerians hostile toward Ghanaian refugees who had fled political and economic unrest suggested they pack their belongings in such sacks and return home,” they explain.

Anatsui’s work reverberates off of works from African-American artists in Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection, creating feedback loops between American and African experiences of postcolonial identity. The museum owns several Basquiat paintings, and though their life experiences couldn’t be more different, it’s hard not to think of them while wandering through the show–Basquiat and Anatsui tread the same thematic ground. The triangle trade is something Basquiat obsessed over, repeating words like “gold,” “sugar,” and “rum” again and again in his paintings. Anatsui’s tone–his rich, rococo wall hangings–is completely at odds with Basquiat’s. But you get the sense that they’re grappling with the same thing, these ghosts that take the form of consumer goods like liquor bottles and sugar bags.

Check out Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui until August 4.

Controversy is Jeremy Scott’s thing; you may remember Co.Design’s coverage of his Adidas shackle sneakers, which braced wearer’s ankles with chains. “In retrospect,” wrote Mark Wilson, “they weren’t such a fantastic idea.” Last month, Scott unveiled his 2013 Adidas Originals collection, and while it’s not all easy punchlines about race and ethnicity, many critics are up in arms about several garments that borrow from Pacific Northwest Native American traditions.

Scott’s thing is parroting genres and subgenres–which usually results in some pretty awesome hybrid garments. Take a peek at the lookbook and see how many distinct cultural sects you can count. I got to five, at least. Scott gives nods to late ’70s British skinheads, ’80s urban streetwear, and ’90s raver culture, to name just a few.

The 2013 collection stumbles into some problematic territory when it comes to a series of tracksuits, shoes, and dresses decorated with cartoon renderings of Pacific Northwest Native American carvings–what some bloggers are calling “totem pole print.” Totems originated as a way for some First Nation groups along the Pacific coast to honor their ancestors, describe legends, and sometimes, memorialize the dead. Scott’s simplified the symbology and tacked them onto dresses, tracksuits, and sneakers.

Curious what those in the Native community would think, I reached out to Jessica Metcalfe, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa who is a professor of Native American art, fashion, and design. As it turns out, she’d already seen the designs and written a post about them. “Misappropriations like this one are bad, unethical, and in some cases illegal,” she told me. “Bizarre, garish, unpleasant and disgusting were several terms used to describe this outfit by people in the Native American community. Several individuals noticed that his inspiration was unoriginal, and that his take on Northwest Coast formline was ignorant, disrespectful and badly construed (in other words, Scott needs to work on his ovoids and u-forms).”

More than that, Metcalfe explains, they devalue the meaning and quality of the original source material. “When companies like Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, or Adidas put out tacky images like this, they perpetuate the idea that Native American people have no sense of ownership or artistic legacy when it comes to our art, and anyone can steal it, tack their name on it, and make a buck–all the while putting forward the idea that our art is ugly and cheap,” she says.

After mulling over these images for a bit, I wondered if there’s a “right” way to do this. Metcalfe thinks so–after all, she’s built a business mindfully promoting Native designers through her blog and online shop, Beyond Buckskin. For the prolific and often very funny Scott, it seems like a missed opportunity: Why not make this a joint effort with the First Nation artists? I’m willing to bet that the fruits of that collaboration would’ve been super interesting. Instead, we get a cartoon version of a tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Even divorced from its historical underpinnings, it’s just sort of. . .lazy.

Whether you agree with critics or not, it seems that Adidas wants to keep these from American eyes–these pieces won’t be available in the United States. Check out the full collection and judge for yourself here.