Two different groups of Americans are expected to march through the streets today.
As thousands of troops march and dozens of tanks roll through Washington, D.C., for a military parade celebrating the Armys 250th anniversary on President Donald Trumps 79th birthday, millions of Americans nationwide are expected to protest against his administration, in what organizers believe will be the largest turnout yet since Trump took office in January for a second term.
Here’s what to know about the No Kings Day protests:
Why are people protesting?
The No Kings Day protest movement builds on this spring’s massive May Day and Hands Off! rallies. They come after days of nationwide demonstrations against controversial federal immigration raids and deportations in Los Angeles and a number of other U.S. cities, which are part of the Trump administration’s ramped-up enforcement efforts.
How big will the rallies be and where will they take place?
Organizers expect 2,000 rallies to take place on Saturday in all 50 states and most major cities, from city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks.” Protesters say they are “taking action to reject authoritarianismand show the world what democracy really looks like.”
To avoid clashes with the Armys anniversary celebrations, protest gatherings will bypass the nation’s capital. (Trump has threatened to use “heavy force” against any protesters at the parade, comments the White House later attempted to clarify by asserting that the president supports “peaceful” protests.)
The No Kings groups have created an extensive interactive map that includes the protest locations and times. The map is embedded on the No Kings website and is searchable by zip code.
Who is behind the protest movement?
Indivisible is the lead organizer of Saturday’s No Kings protests, along with a broad coalition of 180-plus partner organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Common Cause, Greenpeace, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Standing Up for Science. A number of labor unions, including the Communication Workers of America and teacher federations, are also involved in the effort.
Who will be speaking?
The group 50501, another organizer of the protests, told Fast Company that some of the major speakers planned nationwide include former Democratic VP candidate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in St. Paul; Martin Luther King Jr.’s son, Martin Luther King III, and his wife, Arndrea Waters King, in Philadelphia; No Kings Indivisible’s Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, also in Philadelphia; Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib in Detroit; former Republican Representative Joe Walsh (who became a registered Democrat last week) in Charleston; and progressive political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen in downtown Los Angeles.
What else is there to know?
In addition to rallies around the U.S., protests are also expected in several other countries, including the U.K., Mexico, and Germany.
If youve ever flown through outer space, at least while watching a documentary or a science fiction film, youve seen how artists turn astronomical findings into stunning visuals. But in the process of visualizing data for their latest planetarium show, a production team at New Yorks American Museum of Natural History made a surprising discovery of their own: a trillion-and-a-half mile long spiral of material drifting along the edge of our solar system.
So this is a really fun thing that happened, says Jackie Faherty, the museums senior scientist.
Last winter, Faherty and her colleagues were beneath the dome of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, fine-tuning a scene that featured the Oort cloud, the big, thick bubble surrounding our Sun and planets that’s filled with ice and rock and other remnants from the solar systems infancy. The Oort cloud begins far beyond Neptune, around one and a half light years from the Sun. It has never been directly observed; its existence is inferred from the behavior of long-period comets entering the inner solar system. The cloud is so expansive that the Voyager spacecraft, our most distant probes, would need another 250 years just to reach its inner boundary; to reach the other side, they would need about 30,000 years.
The 30-minute show, Encounters in the Milky Way, narrated by Pedro Pascal, guides audiences on a trip through the galaxy across billions of years. For a section about our nascent solar system, the writing team decided theres going to be a fly-by of the Oort cloud, Faherty says. But what does our Oort cloud look like?
To find out, the museum consulted astronomers and turned to David Nesvorný, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. He provided his model of the millions of particles believed to make up the Oort cloud, based on extensive observational data.
Everybody said, go talk to Nesvorný. He’s got the best model, says Faherty. And everybody told us, There’s structure in the model, so we were kind of set up to look for stuff, she says.
The museums technical team began using Nesvorný’s model to simulate how the cloud evolved over time. Later, as the team projected versions of the fly-by scene into the dome, with the camera looking back at the Oort cloud, they saw a familiar shape, one that appears in galaxies, Saturn’s rings, and disks around young stars.
We’re flying away from the Oort cloud and out pops this spiral, a spiral shape to the outside of our solar system, Faherty marveled. A huge structure, millions and millions of particles.
She emailed Nesvorný to ask for more particles, with a render of the scene attached. We noticed the spiral of course, she wrote. And then he writes me back: what are you talking about, a spiral?
While fine-tuning a simulation of the Oort cloud, a vast expanse of ice material leftover from the birth of our Sun, the ‘Encounters in the Milky Way’ production team noticed a very clear shape: a structure made of billions of comets and shaped like a spiral-armed galaxy, seen here in a scene from the final Space Show (curving, dusty S-shape behind the Sun) [Image: AMNH]
More simulations ensued, this time on Pleiades, a powerful NASA supercomputer. In high-performance computer simulations spanning 4.6 billion years, starting from the Solar Systems earliest days, the researchers visualized how the initial icy and rocky ingredients of the Oort cloud began circling the Sun, in the elliptical orbits that are thought to give the cloud its rough disc shape. The simulations also incorporated the physics of the Suns gravitational pull, the influences from our Milky Way galaxy, and the movements of the comets themselves.
In each simulation, the spiral persisted.
No one has ever seen the Oort structure like that before, says Faherty. Nesvorný “has a great quote about this: ‘The math was all there. We just needed the visuals.
An illustration of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud in relation to our solar system. [Image: NASA]
As the Oort cloud grew with the early solar system, Nesvorný and his colleagues hypothesize that the galactic tide, or the gravitational force from the Milky Way, disrupted the orbits of some comets. Although the Sun pulls these objects inward, the galaxys gravity appears to have twisted part of the Oort cloud outward, forming a spiral tilted roughly 30 degrees from the plane of the solar system.
As the galactic tide acts to decouple bodies from the scattered disk it creates a spiral structure in physical space that is roughly 15,000 astronomical units in length, or around 1.4 trillion miles from one end to the other, the researchers write in a paper that was published in March in the Astrophysical Journal. The spiral is long-lived and persists in the inner Oort Cloud to the present time.
The physics makes sense, says Faherty. Scientists, we’re amazing at what we do, but it doesn’t mean we can see everything right away.
It helped that the team behind the space show was primed to look for something, says Carter Emmart, the museums director of astrovisualization and director of Encounters. Astronomers had described Nesvorný’s model as having “a structur,” which intrigued the teams artists. We were also looking for structure so that it wouldn’t just be sort of like a big blob, he says. Other models were also revealing thisbut they just hadn’t been visualized.
The museums attempts to simulate nature date back to its first habitat dioramas in the early 1900s, which brought visitors to places that hadnt yet been captured by color photos, TV, or the web. The planetarium, a night sky simulator for generations of would-be scientists and astronauts, got its start after financier Charles Hayden bought the museum its first Zeiss projector. The planetarium now boasts one of the world’s few Zeiss Mark IX systems.
Still, these days the star projector is rarely used, Emmart says, now that fulldome laser projectors can turn the old static starfield into 3D video running at 60 frames per second. The Hayden boasts six custom-built Christie projectors, part of what the museum’s former president called the most advanced planetarium ever attempted.
In about 1.3 million years, the star system Gliese 710 is set to pass directly through our Oort Cloud, an event visualized in a dramatic scene in ‘Encounters in the Milky Way.’ During its flyby, our systems will swap icy comets, flinging some out on new paths. [Image: AMNH]
Emmart recalls how in 1998, when he and other museum leaders were imagining the future of space shows at the Haydennow with the help of digital projectors and computer graphicsthere were questions over how much space they could try to show.
“We’re talking about these astronomical data sets we could plot to make the galaxy and the stars,” he says. “Of course, we knew that we would have this star projector, but we really wanted to emphasize astrophysics with this dome video system. I was drawing pictures of this just to get our heads around it and noting the tip of the solar system to the Milky Way is about 60 degrees. And I said, what are we gonna do when we get outside the Milky Way?’
“Then [planetarium’s director] Neil Degrasse Tyson “goes, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa, Carter, we have enough to do. And just plotting the Milky Way, that’s hard enough.’ And I said, ‘well, when we exit the Milky Way and we don’t see any other galaxies, that’s sort of like astronomy in 1920we thought maybe the entire universe is just a Milky Way.'”
“And that kind of led to a chaotic discussion about, well, what other data sets are there for this?” Emmart adds.
The museum worked with astronomer Brent Tully, who had mapped 3500 galaxies beyond the Milky Way, in collaboration with the National Center for Super Computing Applications. “That was it,” he says, “and that seemed fantastical.”
By the time the first planetarium show opened at the museum’s new Rose Center for Earth and Space in 2000, Tully had broadened his survey “to an amazing” 30,000 galaxies. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey followedit’s now at data release 18with six million galaxies.
To build the map of the universe that underlies Encounters, the team also relied on data from the European Space Agencys space observatory, Gaia. Launched in 2013 and powered down in March of this year, Gaia brought an unprecedented precision to our astronomical map, plotting the distance between 1.7 billion stars. To visualize and render the simulated data, Jon Parker, the museums lead technical director, relied on Houdini, a 3D animation tool by Toronto-based SideFX.
The goal is immersion, whether it’s in front of the buffalo downstairs, and seeing what those herds were like before we decimated them, to coming in this room and being teleported to space, with an accurate foundation in the science, Emmart says. But the art is important, because the art is the way to the soul.
The museum, he adds, is a testament to wonder. And I think wonder is a gateway to inspiration, and inspiration is a gateway to motivation.
Three-D visuals aren’t just powerful tools for communicating science, but increasingly crucial for science itself. Software like OpenSpace, an open source simulation tool developed by the museum, along with the growing availability of high-performance computing, are making it easier to build highly detailed visuals of ever larger and more complex collections of data.
Anytime we look, literally, from a different angle at catalogs of astronomical positions, simulations, or exploring the phase space of a complex data set, there is great potential to discover something new,” says Brian R. Kent, an astronomer and director of science communications at National Radio Astronomy Observatory. There is also a wealth of astronomics tatical data in archives that can be reanalyzed in new ways, leading to new discoveries.
As the instruments grow in size and sophistication, so does the data, and the challenge of understanding it. Like all scientists, astronomers are facing a deluge of data, ranging from gamma rays and X-rays to ultraviolet, optical, infrared, and radio bands.
Our Oort cloud (center), a shell of icy bodies that surrounds the solar system and extends one-and-a-half light years in every direction, is shown in this scene from ‘Encounters in the Milky Way’ along with the Oort clouds of neighboring stars. The more massive the star, the larger its Oort cloud [Image: AMNH ]
New facilities like the Next Generation Very Large Array here atNRAO or the Vera Rubin Observatory and LSST survey project will generate large volumes of data, so astronomers have to get creative with how to analyze it, says Kent.
More dataand new instrumentswill also be needed to prove the spiral itself is actually there: theres still no known way to even observe the Oort cloud.
Instead, the paper notes, the structure will have to be measured from detection of a large number of objects in the radius of the inner Oort cloud or from thermal emission from small particles in the Oort spiral.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a powerful, U.S.-funded telescope that recently began operation in Chile, could possibly observe individual icy bodies within the cloud. But researchers expect the telescope will likely discover only dozens of these objects, maybe hundreds, not enough to meaningfully visualize any shapes in the Oort cloud.
For us, here and now, the 1.4 trillion mile-long spiral will remain confined to the inside of a dark dome across the street from Central Park.
Modern business operates under a dangerous paradox. The same forces that make curiosity essentialrapid change, complexity, and uncertaintyare the ones that systematically suppress it. While organizations desperately need the innovation and adaptability that comes from asking better questions, the relentless pressure for speed creates an environment where curiosity dies.
Pressure Points
This isn’t theoretical. The consequences play out in boardrooms and headlines daily. Three pressure points consistently strangle organizational curiosity:
Always-On Urgency transforms work into endless reaction cycles. Volkswagen’s emissions scandal emerged when employees, under pressure to quickly meet environmental regulations, defaulted to shortcuts rather than pausing to ask whether their approach was ethical or sustainable. The constant demand for immediate responses eliminates space for the fundamental question: “Is this the right approach?”
Pressure to React Immediately equates speed with competence while framing thoughtful questioning as hesitation. During the Deepwater Horizon crisis, BP executives rushed to provide public reassurances rather than taking time to fully assess the damage. This premature response not only eroded public trust but led to operational missteps that worsened the disaster. When leaders feel compelled to have answers immediately, they abandon the inquiry that leads to better solutions.
Speed-Obsessed Work Culture makes “move fast and break things” the dominant operating principle. Theranos epitomized this dangerunder immense pressure to deliver revolutionary blood-testing technology, leadership ignored scientific red flags and silenced employees who questioned feasibility. The rush to market created a fraudulent enterprise that collapsed under scrutiny.
Its the combination of these pressures that puts organizations at risk. Diane Hamilton, author of Curiosity Unleashed and creator of the Curiosity Code Index, researched what inhibits curiosity in the workplace to help leaders break out of stagnant patterns. According to her findings, when environments squeeze out curiosity, People start holding back ideas, skipping conversations, and sticking to what feels safe. Thats when curiosity shuts down and organizations cling to past ways of doing things that no longer work.
Speed Bumps
The solution isn’t choosing between speed and curiosityit’s installing strategic speed bumps which create just enough pause for better questions to emerge. Leaders need speed bumps at three levels: interpersonal, team, and organizational.
Interpersonal. Curiosity often gets squelched in one-on-one dialogues, but the most powerful speed bump is deceptively simple: pause during heated discussions to state what you heard and ask if you understood correctly.
Instead of rapid-fire debate, try: “I’m gathering that you’re worried about this direction because it might alienate our longest-standing clients. Is that an accurate understanding of your concern?”
This technique significantly increases accurate listening while slowing potentially tense exchanges. It creates room for questions and deepens relationships by signaling that you value others’ perspectives enough to ensure you’ve heard them correctly. When leaders model this behavior, it spreads throughout the organization.
Team-Level. Teams need built-in moments that interrupt the execution mindset. The most effective approach involves structured quiet time before critical discussions or decisions. Allocate a few minutes for everyone to write down thoughts, questions, or concerns before opening discussion.
Use question-oriented brainstorming techniques with creative constraints, such as: “Generate five ‘what if’ questions about our marketing strategy in the next two minutes.” This approach maximizes diverse perspectives while ensuring introverts have processing time and extroverts can refine initial thoughts.
These pauses aren’t about halting team progressthey’re about widening the lens to identify hidden opportunities and blind spots.
Organizational. The highest-leverage organizational speed bump involves reframing acute problems as opportunities for systemic improvement rather than issues requiring quick fixes. When urgent issues arise, resist the default response of immediate patches. Instead, pause to examine underlying causes and explore broader solutions.
Great Ormond Street Hospital demonstrates this approach brilliantly. Facing critical errors during patient transfers between operating rooms and intensive care, hospital leaders could have simply demanded faster, better execution of existing procedures. Instead, they paused to seek inspiration elsewhere.
After observing Formula One pit crews, they invited Ferrari’s team to analyze their patient handover process. The racing experts identified fundamental structural problems: unclear roles, overlapping conversations, and unpredictable leadership transitions. By applying pit crew principlesdefined roles, synchronized actions, and systematic error trackingthe hospital reduced technical errors by nearly half while improving information transfer. The breakthrough came not from moving faster, but from pausing to intentionally redesign the system.
The Roadmap
Start immediately with these three steps:
This week: Implement “paraphrase and check” in your next three important conversations. Notice how it changes the dynamic and information quality.
This month: Introduce two-minute question-oriented brainstorming sessions before your team’s most critical decisions. Track whether this generates insights you would have missed.
This quarter: Identify your organization’s next acute problem as an opportunity for strategic learning rather than quick fixes. Ask what other industries or approaches might offer unexpected solutions.
Organizations don’t need to choose between speed and learningthey need both. Strategic speed bumps maintain momentum while ensuring critical thinking and innovation never get sacrificed. The most successful organizations don’t just move fastthey move wisely.
Parking in a city can be a problem. Its not just about finding parkingits about finding the right parking. Sometimes, theres a $10 parking spot only a block away from a garage that charges $50!
So how do you know the best place to parkespecially if youre new to an area, as I was a few years ago, or if youre traveling and arent familiar with a city?
For me, the answer is a smart and completely free user-submitted database of parking spots and rates. Itll help you understand the best place to park. And Ive personally used it for years.
Psst: If you love these types of tools as much as I do, check out my free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. You’ll be the first to find all sorts of simple tech treasures!
Your inside eye on parking prices
First things first, the elephant in the room: Yes, Google Maps can technically navigate you to a place to park. But, like most other mapping services, it often makes it hard to find all the available garages and lots in any given area. And even if you do manage to find them, it doesn’t show you any meaningful info about how much they charge.
So rather than driving in circles and eyeing prices, look at a service called Parkopedia before you head into a city where parking might be a challenge.
All you have to do is plug a city, address, or street name into the box on the Parkopedia home page. Then, tell it when youll be arriving and when youll be leaving. (Parking prices function by time of day, and day of the week, after all.)
Youll get a convenient map with parking rates. Scroll around, and you can find the best parking options.
When I tell Parkopedia that Ill arrive in Boston in the late afternoon, for example, I see that theres an underground parking lot I can park in for $9instead of the $42 spot a block away! Thats the secret.
Like GasBuddy and so many other apps, Parkopedia depends on user-submitted data, so it may not always be perfectand it may be better in some cities than others. But Parkopedia is available all over the world and has data for many, many places.
By the way, Parkopedia has a parking reservation featurebut Ive never used it! I use it solely as a database, and its a great way to get started when Im figuring out where to park for an event in an unfamiliar city. But if youre thinking of reserving parking online, you might also want to consider SpotHero.
You can use Parkopedia on the web as well as via the service’s native Android and iPhone apps. (But I recommend the website, as it’s simpler and more polished and doesn’t require any downloads.)
Parkopedia is free. (The company makes money by integrating its data into other systems and by selling parking reservations, if you’re interested in that.)
The service promises never to sell your personal data. You dont even have to create an account or sign in to use it.
Ready for even more Cool Tool goodness? Check out my free Cool Tools newsletter for an instant introduction to an incredible audio appand a new off-the-beaten-path gem every Wednesday!
Designer, editor, and educator David Reinfurts 2019 book, A *New* Program for Graphic Design (Inventory Press) was a surprise success, selling out its initial print run in three weeks. Its now in its third edition with translations in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, and Spanish. The book was described as a do-it-yourself textbook, but a traditional design textbook it was not. Across its three chaptersTypography, Gestalt, and InterfaceReinfurt draws on designers, printers, artists, and publishers to show that graphic design is not a narrow area of study but rather a broad way of looking at how we understand the world.
The creation of the book, too, was as unusual as its contents. The three chapters were based on three courses Reinfurt had been teaching at Princeton University. To produce the book, Reinfurt presented all his lectures from all three courses to an audience at Inventory Presss studio in Los Angeles. Transcripts were produced from the three days that were then edited to form the book, making for a casual, dialogue-driven text that is at once personal, meandering, and expansive.
[Cover Image: Inventory Press]
Now, Reinfurt and Inventory Press are releasing a follow-up book, A *Co-* Program for Graphic Design, that is based on three of Reinfurts new courses: Circulation, Multiplicity, and Research. Reinfurt taught these courses over Zoom, during the pandemic, and much like the first book, used the recordings from those sessions as the structure for the new book. Because of the limitations and opportunities of teaching over Zoom, A *Co-* Program introduces a series of new voices, guest lectures from each course, which further expand our understanding of what graphic design can be.
In a moment where graphic design is undergoing profound change, I find this pair of books to help situate both what it means to be a graphic designer and what it means to teach graphic design. Reinfurt, I think, offers a timeless approach to graphic design that transcends technical skills, industry demands, and visual fads in favor of treating design as a serious area of study that blends disciplines and ways of thinking. I was curious to talk with him about the ideas in the books and why graphic design, as a term, is still a useful framing device. Much like the creation of the books themselves, this conversation was conducted over Zoom and edited for clarity. And like their content, this conversation meanders and moves, attempting to find new ways to teach graphic design.
Fast Company: I want to begin by talking about the title of this book. You open A *Co-* Program for Graphic Design with a list of all the alternative titles you had come up with and a roundtable conversation with some former students about what Co-program means. I want to ask you about the other part. I want to ask you about graphic design. What is graphic design?
You have to find a place to locate yourself. Over the years, I’ve worked between a lot of different areas, but my training was in graphic design and I hang on to that as a label.
But you’re asking what graphic design is. That term has been around at least for enough time to gather some historical weight, and I like that, too. The first book was originally going to be titled A New Primer for Visual Literacy, as a play on Donis Dondiss Primer of Visual Literacy, but we decided to rename it because it didnt feel like a good idea to riff on a previous book. We landed on A *New* Program for Graphic Design, which I liked a lot. People know the term graphic design. People are often confused about it, but at least it’s familiar.
I like this idea of graphic design being a way to locate yourself. You’ve called yourself a graphic designer for about 25 years now. Has your understanding of graphic design changed over your career? Does it mean something different to you now than it did when you started?
I’m certain it does, but I don’t worry about that too much. It’s a way to identify where I’m coming from and probably where my work is the most legible.
But I love the idea of a bait and switch. I dont mean that as a trick. I find it’s really useful to be able to give someone a way into the work and then have it become more complex than they’re expecting, because it’s so unsatisfying when it’s the reverse, right?
The reason I asked you those first two questions is that I think thats exactly what you do in these books: you complicate our understanding of what graphic design can be. In the first book, you talk about graphic design as the most liberal of the liberal arts and offer an assortment of definitions throughout both books. I think it’s interesting that this term has all of these different definitions or approaches or ways into it or ways out of it. When you were first invited to teach a graphic design class at Princeton 15 years ago, how did that blurriness or elasticity shape how you thought about what that would mean to teach graphic design?
First, I knew it needed to be an introductory class. What’s the basic skill that’s useful in graphic design? Where do you start? Typography seemed like it. Design has been taught that way for a long time. Theres a historical weight to it; there are a set of skills that come with it, and that seemed like a way to introduce graphic design to the campus that could open up other modes of thought.
You write in the first book that graphic design is often taught just as a series of skills, and that you feel like that shortchanges what it means to teach graphic design. Can you tell me more about that?
In my experience, design education should not be training for a job. If you want to learn practical skills, you can find them in many different ways. But I think in school, the point is to get disoriented, not to get oriented. I feel like in school, you should just have all these crazy ideas and facilitate those because the rest of your working career is going to try to limit that. We’re doing a disservice to train a student for a job. I don’t know what the jobs will be. I don’t just want to see more designers like what we already have. I want to see more designers who are surprising and crazy and can make a go of it for a whole career.
If you think about typography, for example, you’re thinking about both what it says and how it says it. I don’t just mean rhetorically, but visually: a visual form conveys a lot of meaning. This is something every graphic designer knows. It’s pretty easy to understand how hello, written in sans serif, bold, condensed, means something very different than hello in a lowercase script. These lessons of how you can modulate a meaning with form, I think, are a good entryway into graphic design. It is a set of skills that could get you a job, but I also see it as a useful skill hats applicable across many different disciplines. It introduces a rigor in the way you thinkit’s a rigor that thinks about how a message is embodied.
Building on that, there’s almost no mention of technology in these books. Where does technologythe computer, ways of production or makingcome into the classroom?
I keep students off the computer as long as possible, because you realize how they loosen up when they’re working with their hands. Plus, it’s going to change, right? The technology will never be the same and everyone will use it slightly differently. When Im giving assignments, they are meant to be broad. I want to signal Hey, this is something different. You can loosen up. You can do it a different way. Im predisposed to leaving things open for the studentor readerto find their way through it, regardless of the technology.
Lets get into some of the specific content in the book. I think of your first book as being about production and the second book as about distribution. The chapters in the first bookTypography, Gestalt, Interfaceare all about how you put ideas into the work and then the chapters in the second bookCirculation, Multiplicity, Researcherare all about how those ideas go out into the world. Does that sound right to you?
That wasnt intentional, but it sounds right. At least since going to graduate school, Ive been interested in that second part. I would see design in the world and realize how multiplied the responses were: it can be torn in one situation or somebody writes on top of it or puts a sticker on it. Those things are fascinating to me. I realized the work is not done when you’re finished doing the work, the work is done when it’s done being used. I have always felt like that part of design was ignored because it’s not as tidy. I’m not very interested in the monic idea of what it’s supposed to be. Im endlessly interested in all the individual variations: if it’s been altered, or if it doesn’t land the right way.
The first chapter in the book begins with the Black Lives Matter typography because I was interested in how you could write it in ways that rhyme visually, rhyme with each other, but weren’t exactly the same. In that way, it felt like a brand, but it wasnt organized from the top down.
The book opens with the Black Lives Matter typography and ends with a chapter about research. I felt like Research could have been the title of every chapter because the argument you implicitly make here is that all design is a form of research.
I was interested in doing a class on design research because I’d heard that term bandied about a bunch of different ways over time and wanted to look at how it was talked about at different points in time.
To think about all design as research gives you more latitude as a designer to spend more time making things that might not satisfy what needs to be done. To get to the best work, you have to go through a bunch of hoops, and you should follow your intuition. I think that’s what you bring to a project as a designer. So when Im talking about research, I’m really talking about design process: how do you cultivate your own idiosyncratic, wasteful, digestive process?
Both of these books are filled with design history: you jump back and forth through time, looking at different people, looking at different projects, looking at different ways design has been understood. What is the role of design history in your teaching?
I want to find some exemplary practices that I can use as models. It can be powerful to pull examples from the pastfrom a time that is not right nowso you can inject a bit of critical distance. You can say, We dont really work like this anymore but here is one approach. Here is one way someone approached this problem. How does this resonate with what were doing?
As a student, you can look at that and realize that you could also invent an equally novel way of approaching this work now. I instinctively think it’s useful to have heroes or role models that you can look to and think, Here’s somebody who approached their work in a way that really resonates with me. How am I the same or different?
I keep hearing conversations about the death of graphic design. That its being replaced by product designers or brand strategists or creative technologists, or some other new term. History becomes another way to root contemporary work in a discourse.
Yes. This goes back to our discussion of why identify it as graphic design rather than something else, and it just reinforces my opinion that it’s useful to connect what we’re doing now to a body of what people have done before. If we’re constantly changing what it’s called, it just goes poof, up in the air.
A good and useful model that has a much richer discourse than graphic design is architecture. Architecture has shifted what the profession does so radically and architects are very good at claiming lots of territory that doesn’t always look like architecture as we narrowly define it. An obvious example is what OMA has done with AMO in making research a valid output of their studio. Lots of people do that kind of work, but doing it within the context of architecture gives it previous discourse in history to anchor it in. I think in graphic design, weve built that discourse in history, and it is useful to connect these expansive practices to that so students can see a range of opportunities.
Architecture is a good example here because we often think of architecture narrowly as buildings, but AMO or any other architect working outside of that context often describes their work more broadly as a spatial practice. Architecture, then, isnt just about making a building but larger questions of how we relate to things in space. When you think about it that way, you could make a building, but you could also make a film or an exhibition or a temporary structure, and they all connect to these larger questions of space. Does graphic design have something like that to root itself? Is it too simple to say something like text and image?
I do think there’s a core there and it’s close to text and image, but I’d define it as language and its form: how something is said, and the visual form that carries that. Text and image can seem like categories, where the language and the form or something feel like a rich place for discovery.
How has teaching affected how you work on other projects? Has it changed how you think about design? Has it changed how you work?
Surely it has. Teaching doesnt harden up how you think about your work, but instead gives you 85 different ways of talking about it. It gives you lots of perspectives. When I first started teaching, I would not talk about my own work. I wouldn’t even introduce who I was or where it’s coming from. But as I got into it, I realized it can be generous to acknowledge my viewpoint. Here are the things I like to do. Here’s something I was working on last week. I can speak about those things with lots of detail, and that’s more genuine than speaking about something I don’t know about.
I have always thought about teaching and practice being one continuous thing. The only way teaching made sense to me was to make it similar to how I think about design. Im interested in how to make a continuous process and make kind of evrything Im doing speak to the other parts of it. Maybe this is a self-preservation device. Maybe that’s why I’ve been able to work independently for a long time.
Tell me about your own design education. You have a BA in Visual Communication from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale. How did they shape your understanding of all of this?
What I took from my undergraduate education was the freedom to just jump across departments. I was taking math and journalism and English and studio art. I found that liberating. There is a lot that I also took from Yale. I was totally disoriented. Not everyone could make sense of what I was doing, but it didn’t matter because they’re enthusiastically encouraging you to do it your own way.
That sounds like it also speaks to the longevity of your independence and how you operate in the classroom. Its not about developing a specific set of skills to get you a job but developing a point of view to guide your work. Thats basically what these books are about, too.
Hindsight makes it easier to make that connection, but Im sure that’s the case. I remember teaching myself Adobe Illustrator, but the tools were a way to get to something else. You have to find your way first, and then you figure out how you do it.
On a Tuesday afternoon in London, Doug Bierton, the unlikely cofounder and CEO of an even more unlikely $50 million classic soccer jersey company, arrives at 10 Downing Street, the U.K.’s equivalent of the White House.
It’s St. George’s Day, a national day of celebration, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer is hosting a reception. Inside, it’s more Parliament sitting than party as some of the most important people in British politics, donning pressed suits and blouses, mingle.
Then there’s Bierton, a regular bloke from Manchester, who’s wearing a screaming light-blue vintage England soccer jersey from the early 1990s.
Who let that guy in? He’s here by invitation. Bierton cofounded Classic Football Shirts in 2006 alongside his brother, Gary, and college buddy Matt Dale. The prime minister’s team asked if they could bring some England shirts to the reception. “The prime minister’s really interested in football,” they said. “Maybe you could bring some Arsenal shirts, too?”
“I’m talking to the prime minister about football shirts,” Bierton says. “This is the kind of crazy stuff that none of us could have ever imagined.”
Going mainstream
Classic soccer jerseys have exploded into mainstream fashion, with A-listers such as Dua Lipa, Hailey Bieber, Taylor Swift, and Rihanna all sporting vintage jerseys. Sabrina Carpenter even threw an England jersey over her Versace dress onstage at a major London music festival, the Capital Summertime Ball. High-end fashion houses like Balenciaga, Stella McCartney, and Armani have partnered with major football clubs, while the “blokecore” TikTok trend has transformed jerseys into streetwear that transcends sports fandom entirely.
“We’ve seen a huge increase in 18- to 24-year-olds shopping for shirts,” Bierton says. “But I think Balenciaga making a kit isn’t as influential as Travis Scott wearing one onstage. With influencers and those types of creators wearing football shirts, it’s a lot more connected now than it used to be.”
The connection is so strong that Classic Football Shirts is now a $50 million beast leading one of the hottest trends in global fashion, both in sports and beyond. And with the FIFA Club World Cup kicking off in the U.S. this weekend, and the FIFA World Cup coming stateside in 2026, the competition for American soccer fans is on, another charge that Bierton’s team is trying to lead.
A 5 shirt and a near-death experience
In the summer of 2006, Bierton and Dale were soccer-obsessed students at Manchester University. Bierton had been looking for a 1990 Germany World Cup kit to wear to a fancy dress party, but hed come up empty. He eventually found the kit on eBay, as well as an England shirt from the same tournament at a local charity shop that he bought for 5. Strapped for cash, he later put it on eBay, flipping it for a 45 profit.
The scarcity issue was obvious. If they were struggling to find vintage shirts, so were others. But the 45 profit proved a real opportunity in flipping classic soccer jerseys.
Co-Founders Doug Bierton & Matthew Dale in first Manchester warehouse space [Photo: Classic Football Shirts]
Bierton and Dale went all-in. They maxed out their student loans, overdrafts, and credit cards; filled their student house with football shirts; and launched Classic Football Shirts in August 2006. The early days were brutal. Just months after starting, it looked like they were doomed to fail.
“October 2006 was a very cold time,” Bierton says. “We’d put all our cash into this thing, and we went 12 days without selling a shirt. We couldn’t afford to eat. We lost loads of weight. It was really tough.”
But persistence paid off, and by Easter, they were selling 100 worth of classic soccer jerseys a day. Then 200. Then 400.
“We were taking home 50 a day,” Bierton says. “We’re talking a minimum-wage salary, but there was just enough there to pay the bills and to live off. And that’s all we needed, right? As long as we could pay the bills and we still saw the potential with this business, we wanted to keep going.”
The biggest problem: sourcing classic shirts
With the demand established, their biggest problem became clear: How do they find more classic soccer jerseys?
The biggest breakthrough came in 2010. They had moved the business from their student house to a Manchester office, where a man who had just moved there from Italy kept showing up, asking to work for them. They didn’t have a job for him, but they finally said: “Look, if you’re going to keep coming around, call all the Italian football clubs for us. Call all the brands and call all the independent retail stores, and ask if they’ve got any dead stock.”
Two weeks later, the man came back.
“I’ve been speaking to AC Milan,” he told them. “They’ve got a full warehouse of inventory. You wanna go have a look at it?”
Bierton and Dale flew to Italy, and when AC Milan opened those warehouse doors, “it was like Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Bierton says.
[Photo: Classic Football Shirts]
“They literally kept everything, even down to the underpants,” Dale told The Athletic. “They all had the numbers in. So you could tell there was, like, R9 [the Brazilian Ronaldo] who was wearing 99 when he played for Milan. And David Beckham’s underpants! It was just crazy what they had.”
Bierton and Dale bought the whole warehouse20 years’ worth of inventory. “We didn’t have the storage space for it, and we didn’t have the cash for it,” Bierton says. “But we said, Let’s take a loan out, go find a warehouse, and make it work.”
Take big risks, then figure it out
The AC Milan deal established a blueprint that Classic Football Shirts has followed ever since: Take big risks, then figure it out.
This pattern repeated when Nike was closing out all its player-issue inventory. “We needed to spend 1 million to get that inventory,” Bierton recalls. “Did we have 1 million to spend? No. But we went and did it anyway.”
They even sponsored Burnley FC’s shirt in 2022 despite not having a marketing budget for it. Terms were not disclosed, but Burnley shirt sponsors in 2019 and 2023 paid upward of 7 million.
Theyve also made big bets beyond inventory deals. A decade ago, Bierton would never have imagined opening physical retail stores. They’re expensive and difficult to service. But he realized that creating experiential spaces “where people can touch and feel the old shirts from the past” could unlock potential that online sales alone couldn’t match, and they opened their first physical retail store in London in 2018.
A grassroots approach
But the real secret sauce isn’t just big bets; it’s the grassroots approach of pounding the pavement and doing things most people dont want to do. “You’ve got to pick up the phone,” Bierton says. “You’ve got to knock doors. You’ve got to send random emails out to everybody who is trading football shirts. The ultimate thrill of the whole thing has always been that you never know what you’re going to get tomorrow.”
Topps Chrome launch party in New York. [Photo: Classic Football Shirts]
To date, Classic Football Shirts has worked with more than 500 former professional players to buy their personal collections. The sourcing operation has become so sophisticated that brands like Nike, Adidas, and Puma now come to them when they have excess inventory. “We’re working closely with those brands to help design future kits and inspire what they should bring back,” Bierton says.
The company now houses over 30,000 individual items and over 500,000 units in stock, with 7,000 unique or match-worn shirts stored in a climate-controlled vault, the largest collection of its kind. The company represents over 1,000 clubs, stocks shirts from over 50 international teams and more than 200 club teams, and lists 30,000 vintage shirts monthly and thousands daily.
As of May 2024, they were selling upward of 750,000 shirts annually and have sold more than 6 million classic soccer jerseys, shipping to over 130 countries, with their primary focus, like most in their space, shifting to the U.S. ahead of the World Cup.
The power of an authentic brand
Classic Football Shirts has been profitable since its initial October slump. The founders have poured profits back into the business, and its grown 30% year over year since 2019. They now have more than 200 employees.
In 2024, for the first time, the company took outside investment, in the form of $38.5 million, from The Chernin Group, valuing the company somewhere north of $50 million.
“I think there are a lot of businesses that can be manufactured to be authentic,” says Greg Bettinelli, TCG’s partner who led the investment. “This was legitimately two blokes selling Manchester United shirts to offset probably their beer or food budget when they were in university. They’ve cultivated a community and audience without spending any real money on customer acquisition. They tell stories and have created a culture around the business. Having authentic brands and being able to be a trusted source for people to buy shirts from is super important. And so it just all ties together.”
Expanding into the U.S.
[Photo: Classic Football Shirts]
The company has since brought on additional strategic investors, including two-time World Cup and Olympic gold medal winner Alex Morgan, former U.S. men’s national team player Stu Holden, and Rob McElhenney, the actor and producer who famously co-owns Wrexham AFC alongside Ryan Reynolds. McElhenney is a customer turned investor, as he acquired his haul of vintage Wrexham shirts during his club’s takeover talks.
Global sales of new soccer shirts reach beyond $6 billion annually, and Bettinelli sees massive potential in a market he estimates is growing at over 100% year over year. The U.S. already represents 15% of Classic Football Shirts’ salestheir fastest-growing marketwith over 100% year-over-year growth in North America.
Recent capital infusions have already helped accelerate the companys footprint in the U.S. as they plan to take advantage of next years World Cup. Theyve already opened three retail stores in 12 monthsin New York, Los Angeles, and Miamiwith plans for a presence in all 11 World Cup host cities. After just three months, the NYC store alone was competing with the London flagship store in sales.
“The World Cup becomes a really seminal moment, and a lot of people are behind on event planning,” Holden says. “That’s one area where I think Classic Football Shirts has been so smart and strategicopening shops in key cities and having a real plan for being a part of what will be the biggest sporting event the planet has ever seen.”
The biggest sporting event in history
Ahead of the Euros final last July, Google searches for “England jerseys” spiked by 623%, while London-based e-commerce company Depop saw a 294% increase in football shirt searches leading into the tournament. The 2026 World Cup’s impact will dwarf those numbers.
The tournament will be the largest sporting event in history48 teams, 104 matches across 16 cities in three countries, 5.5 million attendees, billions of viewers globally, and over $5 billion in projected revenue.
Classic Football Shirts has already proven theyre ready to capitalize on the event. Their U.S. business “virtually doubled” during summer 2024 alone from Euro 2024 and Copa América. With American football fandom up 60% in the past decade, the number of fans ripe for acquisition is higher than ever.
But this isn’t just about tournament salesit’s about permanently establishing football shirts in American fashion culture.
“This is going to be the biggest sporting event in the history of sport, Bettinelli says. And with 48 teams, it’s showcasing globally. So I think being the leading brand that’s selling football shirts is probably a good place to be.”
Fathers Day comes with mixed feelings as I prepare to enter my 60s. Like many of my contemporaries, I spend a lot of my time looking after an aging fatherstruggling with how to keep his fragile health and well-being from further deterioration. Even a titan of industry like Tim Cook (with unlimited tech and financial resources at his fingertips) is not immune to the challenges of remotely caring for an aging father.
On Fathers Day, I can’t help but wonder how many more of these occasions I will have with my Pop around, and reflect on my own mortality. How might things be different if I am lucky enough to live into my mid 90s as he has? What role will my relationship with technology play in preparing me to better navigate that future? Aging, particularly cognitive decline, exposes a huge gap in our tools and resources that technology is struggling to fill. As a Digital Pioneer who came of age in the era of personal computing it is impossible to imagine a future without this intimate relationship.
While staying in good physical shape is important to me, I am frustrated by the unending wave of new watches, wearables, and other health gizmos coming out of the tech sector that drive our obsession with real-time tracking and performance optimization. This interaction model feels fundamentally misaligned with the experience of aging I have seen in my 94-year old father, who is now struggling through the slow, gradual decline of dementia. My father was intensely physically active throughout his entire lifeeven taking up swimming well into his 80s when he could no longer rush the net. But, at this point, his needs are much more basic and quotidian than they were even five years ago. The world of assistive devices that he occupies (hearing aids, wheelchairs) seems completely out of step with the digital environment that has nurtured me and my generation.
I have lived a charmed life when it comes to technology. A mere two years after I was born, Doug Engelbart introduced the many of the fundamental design features that would define this new world (in the “Mother of All Demos“) including the windows GUI, hypertext, the computer mouse, and videoconferencing. The Sony Walkman came out in 1979, at the onset of my adolescence, and the Apple Mac was released in 1984, the year I started college, ushering in the era of personal computing.
I began my professional career in UX design in the early 90s, at the dawn of the internet, which laid the groundwork for the ecosystem of connected devices we inhabit today. I worked on my first biofeedback devicea handheld heart rate variability (HRV) monitor called the StressEraseralmost 25 years ago. I would argue that digital tech has been the biggest cultural influence on my generation. As former MIT Media Lab professor Kevin Slavin puts it: We are the first generation that grew up with computation as a parent. When I look ahead to my own aging process, I keep wondering whether there is a future breakup for me with the digital tech I have come to know and rely upon.
[Source Photo: malerapaso/iStock/Getty Images]
I never imagined how digital technology would so fundamentally reshape our world (which became the thesis for the book User Friendly, that I developed with acclaimed author and designer Cliff Kuang). But I also never imagined what it might be like to grow old with this very same techuntil recently. Will the impact be a net positive or negative? I know that it would have been of little benefit to my father who never mastered an ATM, much less a smartphone.
This is a story about my generations journey into our 60s, 70s, and beyond, and the potential for tech to help us gracefully adapt to our changing abilities. Its a story about how we can use that technology in a way that our fathers were not willing or able to. Technology can help us better prepare for our future and maintain our agency, particularly in the face of the inevitable physical and cognitive challenges. But its on us to embrace new behaviors and augmentations (and not inherit their perceived stigma from prior generations) while we retain the capacity to adapt alongside them.
Digital pioneers
The prevailing health tech narrative promoted by Peter Thiel and other broligarchs out of Silicon Valley is that biometric data will allow us to maximize day-to-day performance and ultimately turn back the clock on the aging process. American oncologist and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel describes this idealized vision as the American Immortal: Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible. The current wave of health tech is only intensifying our preoccupation.
Yet, while we are obsessively tracking all of this stuff, it turns out that the most fundamental benefits of digital tech may be happening in the background, at least when it comes to our cognitive health. That seems to be the conclusion of a massive meta study of 411,430 digital pioneers like me recently published in Nature, which found that natural uses of digital technology were associated with better cognitive outcomes. Could it be that all of the constant noodling we are doing with our gizmos is actually good for us?
But aging is not primarily a technology problem. It is one of behavior and cultureareas where only a limited number of tech companies can successfully play. As Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown put it back in 1996 in their seminal paper The Coming Age of Calm Technology: The important waves of technological change are those that fundamentally alter the place of technology in our lives. What matters is not technology itself, but its relationship to us. In order to shift the prevailing narrative, we will need to fundamentally alter that relationship. There is a massive potential for companies like Apple to upend our relationship to aging in both emotional and functional ways.
The large tech companies have the unique capacity to take our existing behaviors and make these changes ambient, says Rick Robinson, the VP of Product Innovation for the AARP AgeTech Lab. He believes that their ubiquitous reach and scale could be transformative when it comes to aging and cognitive decline if they can be fully embedded in our digital environment. Apples cmmitment to health is a priority at the highest levels of the company. If you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, What was Apples greatest contribution to mankind, it will be about health according to CEO Tim Cook.
The basic infrastructure is already maturing through the convergence of mainstream digital platforms like the Apple Watch with personalized health tech augmentations like continuous glucose monitors (CGMs). Cardiologist Eric Topol, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, has long argued that smartphone apps, sensors, and peripherals can perform many diagnostics from ultrasounds and electrocardiograms to home tests of blood pressure (the adoption of which accelerated during the pandemic). And they can do it on a continuous basis.
He believes that apps give himand his patientsa better portrait of day-to-day health. With the convergence of biometric data and AI, that portrait is now three-dimensional. In order to make the most of the time we haveand improve our baseline as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei puts it in his essay “Machines of Loving Grace“we should be using these capabilities to sense inevitable changes earlier and adapt while we still have the agency to live the life we seek. To preserve our sense of independence and agency and allow someone to be in command of their life and person on their terms as former McKinsey and frog healthcare designer Montana Cherney describes it.
I could be part of the first generation exiting middle age with the benefit of a continuous, longitudinal data set of our basic health biometrics generated by Oura rings and Apple Watches. What could this data tell us? This past February, Apple announced a massive, five-year, wide-ranging health study that could be a huge step in the right direction with the potential to broaden our understanding across a range of physical biometrics, cognitive behavior, and contextual variables.
We anticipate we will likely find some signals that have previously just been missed because we havent had studies that are this broad, or we havent had studies that are this continuous. We havent looked longitudinally or at this level of granularity, according to Calum MacRae, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who will serve as principal investigator on the Apple Health Study. And, with the increasing capabilities of AI, this evolving data set will give us (and our caregivers) a much richer window into our physical and cognitive abilities at a much earlier stage in our health journeys, while we still have the mental and physical resilience to adapt. Now, we just need a different design paradigm.
The signal is already there
If you look past the hype, this signal is already there, though buried among more flashy data points and visualizations. For example, your iPhone can already assess changes in your balance through a set of custom steadiness algorithms. For more than five years, I tried to convince my father to carry a lightweight, collapsible walking stick as he navigates the sidewalks of New York. A little data could have gone a long way to demonstrate that minor changes in his balance had already occurred and put him at risk for the type of fall that can have a drastic effect on his quality of life. But this data is buried deeply within the Apple Health interface for all of us. Why not surface it more actively as we age?
As we live longer, the next frontier is cognitive health. Approximately five million Americans over 65 have Alzheimers; one in three Americans 85 and older has Alzheimers, according to the Alzheimers Association. And the prospect of that improving in the next few decades is not clear. Instead of predicting a cure in the foreseeable future, many are warning of a tsunami of dementiaa nearly 300% increase in the number of older Americans with dementia by 2050. Yet we dont have an integrated conceptual model for cognitive health the way we do for physical health beyond a single metric like HRV, which is commonly used to assess short-term stress. What would it look like to close our cognitive health ringsnot just our physical ones? How could that help us build a long-term picture of our cognitive baseline, particularly while we still have the ability to adjust our behaviors and the interfaces that support them?
[Source Photo: Issarawat Tattong/iStock/Getty Images Plus]
While there is no singular clinical explanation for the cause of dementia, there is general agreement that the likelihood is compounded by a positive feedback loop of factors such as social isolation, hearing loss, and reduced motivation to be active in the worldall things that could be sensed much earlier through a more intimate relationship with tech. Your smartphone already knows how much time you spend outside in daylight, or how much time you spend in loud and chaotic environments. But it is not telling us how this contextual data over time correlates with key health biometrics like HRV, the agreed upon indicator of stress. As a caretaker, this type of simple data, which is often overlooked in the quest for the perfect workout or meditation session, would be invaluable in increasing my situational awareness.
What if tech could have helped my family understand my fathers changing cognitive abilities much earlier in his aging process? And not only sensed those changes, but gradually layered in additional supports and digital augmentations without disrupting his familiar habits. A smartphone that proactively offers to read out his emails rather than waiting for him to learn a new habit, such as selecting voice-to-text within an obscure app setting. There is reason to believe that Apples big virtual health study may uncover ways to build more proactive features. For instance, detecting if an early change in hearing could reduce the risk of cognitive decline down the line, according to recent coverage of their announcement. The potential, when combined with the advanced capabilities of AirPods, is not to just document research findings, but to be able to introduce positive health adaptations that might have direct therapeutic benefits.
A new generation of tech
As a generation we are now in constant contact with an envelope of digital services that could allow us to sense cognitive shifts over time with a high degree of sensitivity and then tune familiar interfaces to better adust to our changing abilities and our external environment. According to Robinson there is already a panoply of products that just need to be tuned to different cognitive needs, from memory loss to dementia. Adaptations that we can start to make gradually, before we face more serious issues and, most importantly, while we still have the cognitive capacity to adjust. We have many of the digital tools already but need to build in ambient intelligence and shift the design paradigm.
In the background, a number of features like text to speech, that have been widely implemented for accessibility reasons, stand at the ready to support us as we age if we can just design better interfaces to more naturally transition between modalities as we age. That could start with familiar interfaces, like notifications or navigation, that could be tuned to our changing abilities, particularly as they are integrated with smart glasses or other forms of context-aware AR displays.
Robinson provided a simple example from his early work at the AgeTech Collaborative where they developed a concept for AR eyeglasses to address the embarrassment associated with memory loss. The glasses would be augmented with a small camera, microphone, and computer vision that could be trained to recognize family and close friends. It would be paired with a capability that already exists with many hearables to “whisper” information, such as incoming text messages, in a discreet manner (which Robinson has already integrated into his personal layer of daily augmentations). Whispering, perhaps in the soothing and familiar tone of a synthesized family member, is just the sort of subtle design choice that could ease the burden and anxiety of aging in the future.
It was interesting talking to Slavin who was born with congenital hearing loss. He sees a future in which AirPods will soon be able to match you to your auditory environments; quickly matching you to who is in front of you. The cognitive payoff to this digitally enabled sensing and adjusting feedback loop could be significant in relation to the types of changes that he has seen in his aging mother: The harder it is to focus, the harder it is to focus. So, (audio) technology can help us direct that to the best outcome, like blurring the background in Zoom. Using sophisticated tools to narrow (our) attention to the thing that we actually want to pay attention to.
[Source Photo: spaxiax/iStock/Getty Images]
Cherney feels a sense of reassurance as someone with a potential genetic predisposition to dementia living as a non-native speaker in Germany: I will be able to navigate much more easily than I would today. It is still scary, but in 20 years I feel like that translation will be seamless. Even with dementia, it will be effortless. I will just have my headphones in, and it will know me and know how to read the situation. The evidence from the Nature meta study seems to offer some reason for hope: Developing evidence shows that cognitive offloading to digital devices can allow older adults to compensate for age-related declines in cognitive control, memory and navigation abilities, increasing functional performance even in the face of cognitive decline.
A lot has changed since my father entered middle age. His generation benefited from massive improvements in medicine. Like so many of his peers, he is on a daily diet of low dose, maintenance pills to make micro-adjustments to his blood pressure, anxiety, depression, cholesterol, sleep, and a host of other concerns. These medical innovations have cumulatively raised the floor on his physical health and have meaningfully extended his ability to age in place at 94.
In the future, as we age, will tech augmentations in small, gradual doses provide a similar benefit to our generation and help us adapt gradually, in a way that our parents never really had a chance to? Many of the examples I have offered may seem relatively trivial in the face of neurodegenerative diseases, like dementia, that are largely untreatable today. But the feedback loops are real and play a significant role in the speed of cognitive decline. Technology is all about feedback loops, as Cliff wrote in the opening chapter of User Friendly. And user experience is at its heart the craft of designing better ones. While I am increasingly hopeful, it will take a different vision of healthy aging to get us there. This seems like a challenge fit for design in the age of AI.
This week, Apple previewed its redesigned (and renumbered) operating systems at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. While the new Liquid Glass design language was the star of the show across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26, there were some other standout features, like a vastly improved calling experience on the iPhone.
Apple also continued its annual tradition of introducing new privacy and security features in its latest operating systems, designed to keep you and your data safer than ever. Here are three of my favorite ones coming to the iPhone, iPad, and Macand three missed opportunities.
The Passwords app will now remember previous passwords
With iOS 18 and macOS 15 last year, Apple introduced the Passwords appthe one-stop app for managing all your passwords. The app was Apples first attempt at a standalone password manager, and it provided a robust set of management tools, including the ability to autocomplete 2FA codes, share passwords with family and friends, and even organize your passkeys.
In iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26, Apple is adding a new feature to the Passwords app. It will allow you to see the previous passwords youve saved for any given website, along with the date you changed the password. Its an especially useful feature for websites that require you to change your password periodically and do not allow you to reuse a previously used password. Now, youll be able to quickly glance at the past passwords youve used for the site and easily choose an alternate one.
Texts filtered as spam will automatically have their links disabled.
Spam link protection in Messages stops you from clicking on a nefarious URL
While the iPhone, iPad, and Mac are among the gadgets with the best security protections built in, bad actors are becoming more clever in finding ways to exploit vulnerabilities in the operating systems they target. A common way these bad actors can infect your device with malware is by using a one-click attack. This is when the threat actor texts you a link, which you then click on. You may think this link is innocuous, but really the moment you clicked on it, it allowed the attacker to access data on your phone.
Bad actors know that many people will click on links that are texted to them, even from unknown senders. But now in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26, when the operating system suspects youve received a spam text, it will silo that text into a dedicated spam folder and convert the link to plain textmeaning it wont be clickable.
You can still read the text and link in the spam folder, but the chances of you accidentally activating the link with a brush of your thumb are reduced. And if you decide the text isnt spam and the link is safe, you can simply move the text to your regular message screen, where the link will once again be clickable.
FileVault encryption, enabled by default, keeps your data safe
For over two decades now, Macs have come with an optional extra layer of data security called FileVault. The technology encrypts your Macs storage so none of the data can be read on it unless the users password is entered first. This means that someone could steal your Macs storage, hook it up to another computer, and still not be able to get access to the data contained on it if they didnt know your password.
Until now, FileVault has been something Mac users had to enable manually. But starting with macOS 26, FileVault will be enabled automatically for all users when they update to the new operating system. Turning on FileVault is something users should have been doing the entire time anyway, and it’s nice that Apple is finally making its activation default, as it will help secure the Macs data even in the unfortunate event that the computer is stolen and a bad actor has access to the drive.
Still . . . there are missed opportunities
While the three privacy and security enhancements noted above will make our iPhones, iPads, and Macs more secure and private than ever, it was disappointing to see that Apple didnt add any other major privacy and security features this year. Some of the missed opportunities include:
Lockable apps on Mac and Apple TV: Last year, Apple gave users the ability to restrict an apps access on an iPhone or iPad behind Face ID or Touch ID. Before the app opens, you need to authenticate with your biometrics or PIN, ensuring that people who are using your phone or tablet cant access data in apps you dont want them to see. This kind of restricted app access would also be extremely useful on other devices we frequently share, such as our Macs and Apple TV.
Limited calendar access: In past years, Apple introduced the ability to limit an apps read access to just select photos in your photo library and select contacts in your address book. However, when it comes to calendars, you must either grant an app permission to access all of your calendar data, allow it to only add calendar entries, or deny all access. Still missing is the granular control to give an app read/write access to only select calendars, such as your work calendar, but not your personal one.
Lockable folders: Many of us share our Macs with family members or work colleagues. A privacy and security feature Mac users have hoped for for years, which is still conspicuously absent, is the ability to lock individual folders in macOSs Finder behind Touch ID or a password. This would prevent someone with access to your user account (say, your child) from readingor accidentally deletingimportant or sensitive documents (such as your health records).
Yet despite these misses, this years software releases show Apple is still working to actively increase privacy and security for users across its devices. The passwords, spam link, and FileVault improvements will be available when Apple rolls out its software updates to all users in September.
Acquiring new customers has become increasingly challenging and expensive. Customer acquisition costs have risen substantially in the last five years, and theyre still climbing. Attention is scarce, and even a great product isnt enough to guarantee customer retention.
The fastest growth can be found not by pouring more money into marketing but by turning your existing users into advocates. And we found that at our HR tech platform, which offers a suite of technological solutions and assumes all risks and obligations associated with engaging contractors, the insights that lead to the highest customer retention come from addressing negative reviews.
Handled correctly, a one-star review can go from being a blemish on your reputation to a goldmine of insights that can drive product improvements, bolster user satisfaction, and ultimately, fuel growth. Heres how.
The economics of listening
Your current user base is a treasure trove of opportunity. These users have already navigated your onboarding processes and understand your products value. Engaging with their feedback can lead to enhancements that can make them champions of your brand.
According to a Capital One Shopping report, 99% of American consumers read reviews before buying, and 93% say reviews impact their purchasing decisions. A CouponBirds survey found that 96% of consumers leave feedback at least some of the time, and 44% do so always.
Reviews are a very loud source of business intelligencea real-world focus group if you will.
For instance, at our company, we once received an angry message from a freelancer claiming we were withholding their payment. Our initial reaction was confusion. Everything looked fine. But after digging in, we discovered the real issuethe client had failed to approve the task. At the time, our system had no failsafe. If clients went silent, freelancers got stuck, which caused numerous payments to be delayed.
This message led to a product changeafter a fixed time period, work now would be auto-approved. This tweak made our platform more efficient and trustworthy, not only for freelancers, but for businesses too.
Every user is a potential advocate
It can be tempting to only focus on decision-makers. But anyone who interacts with your product can become a powerful amplifier.
A Kenyan contractor doing translations for $300 a month might not be on your CRM radar, but their experience matters. A single post on a Reddit thread, a comment in a WhatsApp group, or a Trustpilot review can influence dozens of prospective usersespecially in industries where reputation travels fast and word-of-mouth is gold.
Thats why we treat every review seriously, regardless of where it appearsGoogle Play, the App Store, Trustpilot, or email. We reach out, ask follow-up questions, and even track users down on other platforms to ensure their voice is heard and their issues addressed. It only takes one frustrated customer sharing a bad experience to damage trust. Instead of letting that happen, why not use the opportunity to turn the customer into an evangelist for your brand?
In addition, negative feedback can impact a companys culture. When engineers or operations teams see complaints go unaddressed, morale suffers. It has been well-documentedincluding by Harvard Business Reviewthat employees lose motivation when their work is publicly criticized and nothing changes. Getting to solve a problem for unhappy customers can become fuel for the team building the product and a motivated team will deliver better results.
Four steps for turning feedback into growth
#1: Know whos speaking
Everyone sees the product from a different angleand their complaints address divergent priorities. A workflow bug might frustrate your end user but never reach leadership. A missing report might annoy your buyer, even if it doesnt block usage. Categorizing feedback by personatechnical user, business buyer, etc.helps you decide what to fix first and whats noise.
#2: Build direct escalation paths
The support team sees issues long before they reach the C-suite. If a complaint surfaces twice, it shouldnt need a third time to get flagged. Give customer-facing teams a clear path to share feedback with product, legal, operationswhoever can actually solve it. And empower them to identify patterns, not just create tickets. If your team has to make a case to be heard, your users are already slipping through the cracks.
#3: Ask better questions
A complaint is an invitation to find out the root problem. Instead of doing a surface fix, get curious. What is the complaint a symptom of? Why does this matter? What downstream effect is it creating? Thats how you find problems worth solving.
We had a case like this. One HR representative told us our multi-currency setup was frustrating. We asked why. As it turned out, switching accounts required special permissions, delaying task creation and costing money. We redesigned the experience, enabling teams to work in a single window and assign tasks across currencies instantly. This change accelerated workflows as well as payments and led to happier clients.
#4: Close the loopevery time
When you resolve an issue, tell the person who flagged it. People remember when theyre heard, and this builds trust and loyalty. A report by Qualtrics found that 88% of customers will likely recommend an organization after a pleasant experience. Don’t automate empathy. Instead, respond like it matters, because it does.
When handled with care, feedback becomes a road mapnot only for a better user experience, but for longer relationships, a stronger culture, and building trust. You dont need to turn every user into an ambassador. But if you treat each one like they could be, youll build a productand a brandthat people fight to stay with.
As summer arrives, people are turning on air conditioners in most of the U.S. But if youre like me, you always feel a little guilty about that. Past generations managed without air conditioningdo I really need it? And how bad is it to use all this electricity for cooling in a warming world?
If I leave my air conditioner off, I get too hot. But if everyone turns on their air conditioner at the same time, electricity demand spikes, which can force power grid operators to activate some of the most expensive, and dirtiest, power plants. Sometimes those spikes can ask too much of the grid and lead to brownouts or blackouts.
Research I recently published with a team of scholars makes me feel a little better, though. We have found that it is possible to coordinate the operation of large numbers of home air-conditioning units, balancing supply and demand on the power gridand without making people endure high temperatures inside their homes.
Studies along these lines, using remote control of air conditioners to support the grid, have for many years explored theoretical possibilities like this. However, few approaches have been demonstrated in practice and never for such a high-value application and at this scale. The system we developed not only demonstrated the ability to balance the grid on timescales of seconds, but also proved it was possible to do so without affecting residents comfort.
The benefits include increasing the reliability of the power grid, which makes it easier for the grid to accept more renewable energy. Our goal is to turn air conditioners from a challenge for the power grid into an asset, supporting a shift away from fossil fuels toward cleaner energy.
Adjustable equipment
My research focuses on batteries, solar panels, and electric equipmentsuch as electric vehicles, water heaters, air conditioners, and heat pumpsthat can adjust itself to consume different amounts of energy at different times.
Originally, the U.S. electric grid was built to transport electricity from large power plants to customers homes and businesses. And originally, power plants were large, centralized operations that burned coal or natural gas, or harvested energy from nuclear reactions. These plants were typically always available and could adjust how much power they generated in response to customer demand, so the grid would be balanced between power coming in from producers and being used by consumers.
But the grid has changed. There are more renewable energy sources from which power isnt always available, like solar panels at night or wind turbines on calm days. And there are the devices and equipment I study. These newer options, called distributed energy resources, generate or store energy near where consumers need itor adjust how much energy theyre using in real time.
One aspect of the grid hasnt changed, though: Theres not much storage built into the system. So every time you turn on a light, for a moment theres not enough electricity to supply everything that wants it right then: The grid needs a power producer to generate a little more power. And when you turn off a light, theres a little too much: A power producer needs to ramp down.
The way power plants know what real-time power adjustments are needed is by closely monitoring the grid frequency. The goal is to provide electricity at a constant frequency60 hertzat all times. If more power is needed than is being produced, the frequency drops and a power plant boosts output. If theres too much power being produced, the frequency rises and a power plant slows production a little. These actions, a process called frequency regulation, happen in a matter of seconds to keep the grid balanced.
This output flexibility, primarily from power plants, is key to keeping the lights on for everyone.
Finding new options
Im interested in how distributed energy resources can improve flexibility in the grid. They can release more energy, or consume less, to respond to the changing supply or demand, and help balance the grid, ensuring the frequency remains near 60 hertz.
Some people fear that doing so might be invasive, giving someone outside your home the ability to control your battery or air conditioner. Therefore, we wanted to see if we could help balance the grid with frequency regulation using home air-conditioning units rather than power plants, without affecting how residents use their appliances or how comfortable they are in their homes.
From 2019 to 2023, my group at the University of Michigan tried this approach, in collaboration with researchers at Pecan Street Inc., Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
We recruited 100 homeowners in Austin to do a real-world test of our system. All the homes had whole-house forced-air cooling systems, which we connected to custom control boards and sensors the owners allowed us to install in their homes. This equipment let us send instructions to the air-conditioning units based on the frequency of the grid.
Before I explain how the system worked, I first need to explain how thermostats work. When people set thermostats, they pick a temperature, and the thermostat switches the air-conditioning compressor on and off to maintain the air temperature within a small range around that set point. If the temperature is set at 68 degrees, the thermostat turns the AC on when the temperature is, say, 70, and turns it off when its cooled down to, say, 66.
Every few seconds, our system slightly changed the timing of air-conditioning compressor switching for some of the 100 air conditioners, causing the units aggregate power consumption to change. In this way, our small group of home air conditioners reacted to grid changes the way a power plant wouldusing more or less energy to balance the grid and keep the frequency near 60 hertz.
Moreover, our system was designed to keep home temperatures within the same small temperature range around the set point.
Testing the approach
We ran our system in four tests, each lasting one hour. We found two encouraging results.
First, the air conditioners were able to provide frequency regulation at least as accurately as a traditional power plant. Therefore, we showed that ar conditioners could play a significant role in increasing grid flexibility. But perhaps more importantlyat least in terms of encouraging people to participate in these types of systemswe found that we were able to do so without affecting peoples comfort in their homes.
We found that home temperatures did not deviate more than 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit from their set point. Homeowners were allowed to override the controls if they got uncomfortable, but most didnt. For most tests, we received zero override requests. In the worst case, we received override requests from 2 of the 100 homes in our test.
In practice, this sort of technology could be added to commercially available internet-connected thermostats. In exchange for credits on their energy bills, users could choose to join a service run by the thermostat company, their utility provider, or some other third party.
Then people could turn on the air-conditioning in the summer heat without that pang of guilt, knowing they were helping to make the grid more reliable and more capable of accommodating renewable energy sourceswithout sacrificing their own comfort in the process.
Johanna Mathieu is an associate professor of electrical engineering & computer science at the University of Michigan.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
