Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Wishing Derek Parfit were still around to roll his eyes at this.

Research assistants at ETH Zurich's Laboratory for Movement Biomechanics have identified a problem common to users of manual wheelchairs. Reto Togni and Stefan Villiger learned that wheelchair users have to constantly correct course, putting undue strain on their shoulders and occasionally causing injury. When rolling across a surface that's tilted to one side—as sidewalks are, in order to shed rain—the user must push harder on the down side. Also, when turning, the user must essentially apply the brakes on one side while pushing with the other side, effectively working against themselves.

Togni and Villiger came up with a clever solution. Their modified wheelchair design can be put in "steering mode," whereby the front wheels are locked into a straight position. The backrest is connected to the rear wheels, and when the user leans, the wheelchair turns:

To test their design out, the duo had 29 participants each navigate an obstacle course six times, using both a conventional wheelchair and the prototype. The comparison showed a clear difference:

"It was already clear in the first round that the test participants needed much less energy to steer with the backrest," says Togni. Co-developer Villiger took part himself and confirms: "When travelling with the prototype along the straight incline, I didn't have to correct the steering with my hand once. And it was also much easier to move forward round the bend. With the conventional wheelchair I was constantly braking and propelling at the same time." This is also shown in the evaluations (see diagram).

Although the test participants required less energy to move forward with backrest-steered wheelchairs, they travelled faster than when in conventional wheelchairs. This astonished even the researchers: "You normally need more energy the faster you travel," says Togni.

…there are also further health benefits: the gentle body movements needed for steering are also likely to stimulate the blood flow and can provide relief against backache and indigestion. Moreover, the weight shift relieves the bottom and could help to prevent pressure marks.

Another advantage is that you can navigate with one hand and have the second hand free to transport things from one place to another – be it an umbrella, mobile phone or a coffee.

The only downside to the design is, it makes it more difficult to do 180s in place and to navigate within tight environments. For that reason, Togni and Villiger have designed their prototype to be able to switch back to the normal steering configuration.

Togni points out the importance of doing user research, which is what enabled he and Villiger to come up with the design improvement. "The wheelchair has [been viewed as something for caregivers to use] as a device for transporting sick and disabled people and has until now been viewed too little from the user's perspective."

The duo have secured a patent, but have run into an obstacle preventing them from going into mass production: The onerous rules of the Swiss healthcare system, which demands high adjustability for different body sizes. The duo are confronting the challenges and hope to have their design on the market by 2027.

Here's Togni explaining and demonstrating the design:

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
The eyelashes suddenly appear as part of a rapid transition to being an anime character.

In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever.

Davies proposes that:

For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system.

Davies, The Unaccountability Machine, page 17

Once you start looking for accountability sinks, you see them all over the place. When your health insurance declines a procedure; when the airline cancels your flight; when a government agency declares that you are ineligible for a benefit; when an investor tells all their companies to shovel so-called AI into their apps. Everywhere, broken links between the people who face the consequences of the decision and the people making the decisions.

That’s assuming, of course, that a person did make a decision at all. Another mechanism of accountability sinks is the way in which decisions themselves cascade and lose any sense of their origins. Davies gives the example of the case of Dominion Systems vs Fox News, in which Fox News repeatedly spread false stories about the election. No one at Fox seems to have explicitly made a decision to lie about voting machines; rather, there was an implicit understanding that they had to do whatever it took to keep their audience numbers up. At some point, someone had declared (or else strongly implied) that audience metrics were the only thing that mattered, and every subsequent decision followed out from that. But who can be accountable to a decision that wasn’t actually made?

It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider what we mean by “accountable.” Davies posits that:

The fundamental law of accountability: the extent to which you are able to change a decision is precisely the extent to which you can be accountable for it, and vice versa.

Davies, The Unaccountability Machine, page 17

Which is useful. I often refer back to Sidney Dekker’s definition of accountability, where an account is something that you tell. How did something happen, what were the conditions that led to it happening, what made the decision seem like a good one at the time? Who were all of the people involved in the decision or event? (It almost never comes down to only one person.) All of those questions and more are necessary for understanding how a decision happened, which is a prerequisite for learning how to make better decisions going forward.

If you combine those two frameworks, you could conclude that to be accountable for something you must have the power to change it and understand what you are trying to accomplish when you do. You need both the power and the story of how that power gets used.

The comparisons to AI are obvious, inasmuch as delegating decisions to an algorithm is a convenient way to construct a sink. But organizations of any scale—whether corporations or governments or those that occupy the nebulous space between—are already quite good at forming such sinks. The accountability-washing that an AI provides isn’t a new service so much as an escalated and expanded one. Which doesn’t make it any less frightening, of course; but it does perhaps provide a useful clue. Any effort that’s tried and failed to hold a corporation to account isn’t likely to have more success against an algorithm. We need a new bag of tricks.

Adblock test (Why?)

When I was at ID school in the early '90s, they taught us "No one wants a toaster. What people want is toast."

The times have definitely changed, if the success of this Vaaka device is any indication. It's an analog scale designed to provide "a meditative exploration of the balance between coffee and life."

It adds several steps to your coffeemaking process, I suppose to deliver a "curated" exercise in tactility. Here's how you're meant to use it:

To paraphrase Mitch Hedberg, I don't need another step between me and coffee. But I am not the target market. This project has been successfully Kickstarted, and to me it suggests people enjoy experiencing rituals with objects, and/or they're craving tactility, the manipulation of tools to achieve an aim. Which makes sense to me, given the digital nature of modern life.

That being the case, I can't criticize the object directly. I think of objects like this not as a symptom of an ailing society, but as the antibodies that show up to reveal that there is an unseen ailment.

And more school.