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After nearly a decade of planning and consultation, the San Francisco Unified School District has made its first venture into the unexpectedand increasingly relevantbusiness of affordable housing development. The district just opened Shirley Chisholm Village, a 135-unit housing complex in San Francisco’s oceanside Sunset District. Built on district-owned land, with affordable rents and preference given to SFUSD educators, it’s a model for the ways urban school districts can use their extensive land holdings to address the housing-affordability challenges faced by their own employees. The $105 million project was developed by the nonprofit MidPen Housing with a design by San Francisco-based BAR Architects & Interiors, in coordination with the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. The units, set aside for residents who earn between 30% and 100% of the area’s median income, range from studios up to three-bedroom apartments. Other school districts have taken similar approaches, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, which began developing underutilized district-owned sites into housing back in 2009. SFUSD’s first foray into housing development stands out for both its design and the process behind it. [Photo: Bruce Damonte/courtesy BAR Architects & Interiors] The design of the building and its range of amenities were influenced directly by the preferences of the district’s teachers. A panel of educators helped guide the decade-long planning process to bring about the project, participating in workshops to shape its amenities and social spaces. “One of the main things that came out of those workshops was the desire to have a space to work when they came home, but not to work from their apartment,” says architect Patricia Centeno, a principal at BAR Architects & Interiors. The architects carved out a space on the five-story building’s top floor, facing the ocean, for a work-from-home lounge and gathering space. [Photo: Bruce Damonte/courtesy BAR Architects & Interiors] Other input from educators guided the way the project interfaces with the surrounding community, which is primarily made up of modest single-family homes. Dropping a 135-unit building in the middle of the neighborhood could have been a shock, but the designers worked to ensure the building and its site were not an imposition. [Photo: Bruce Damonte/courtesy BAR Architects & Interiors] It was a tricky balance to strike, because not long ago the site was a wide-open asphalt parking lot with a small, underutilized storage building, and the community had turned the parking lot into a makeshift neighborhood park. Nearly an acre and a half, it was used for basketball, skateboarding, and a range of other recreational activities. Replacing that with housingespecially housing that was at least a story or two taller than everything around itcould have been grounds for a vocal opposition campaign. The architects focused on making sure the project’s footprint was as small as possible. “One of our goals was to try to find a way to incorporate a portion of [the community park],” says Centeno. “We knew we were never going to be able to create something as extensive as what they had, but we worked with our client to see if we could meet the goal for the total number of units, and also create some sort of common public space.” [Photo: Bruce Damonte/courtesy BAR Architects & Interiors] What they came up with is a publicly accessible plaza, playground, and seating area placed in a carve-out along one of the project’s street-facing edges. “It’s a little bit of a return to the neighborhood,” says Chris Haegglund, president and CEO of BAR Architects & Interiors. A small one-story annex building that sits nearby is intended to be leased out to a local nonprofit. These spaces, and several residents-only common areas, were made possible by creatively shaping the building into an elongate H as seen from above, filling in the voids with courtyards and green space. [Photo: Bruce Damonte/courtesy BAR Architects & Interiors] From the street level, the building was designed to blend into the low-slung neighborhood as much as possible, despite rising to four and five stories in various places. Haegglund says the structure was stepped down at its edges to make a smoother transition to the smaller homes on either side. This nod to the context is also a geographical reference, evoking the sand dunes that once made up this section of San Francisco before development. “We’re trying to create a building that feels contemporary,” says Centeno. “But we’re trying to fit into a neighborhood of homes that were largely built in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, which is kind of newer by San Francisco standards.” [Photo: Bruce Damonte/courtesy BAR Architects & Interiors] To give the building that contemporary feel, the architects put an undulation into the roofline, having it mimic rolling dunes and referencing the roofs of the nearby houses. This undulation was also added to the facade of the building in a nod to the bay windows common in the region. Though the project was not required to include parking under the city’s zoning code, the developers chose to include some underground spaces, partly to assuage neighborhood concerns about street parking and partly at the request of the educators who helped guide the design process. Despite ample public transportation in much of San Francisco, this neighborhood is on the fringes, and some were concerned about potentially long commutes to schools in other parts of town. As a district-owned site, it does have the benefit of being embedded in its neighborhood, which makes its conversion to housingand the conversion of other district-owned sitesvery logical. And Shirley Chisholm Village is just the start. SFUSD has three other housing projects in the works.
Category:
E-Commerce
About 33 miles south of Phoenix, Interstate 10 bisects a line of solar panels traversing the desert like an iridescent snake. The solar farms shape follows the path of a canal, with panels serving as awnings to shade the gently flowing water from the unforgiving heat and wind of the Sonoran Desert. The panels began generating power last November for the Akimel Ootham and Pee Posh tribesknown together as the Gila River Indian Community, or GRICon their reservation in south-central Arizona, and they are the first of their kind in the U.S. The community is studying the effects of these panels on the water in the canal, hopeful that they will protect a precious resource from the deserts unflinching sun and wind. In September, GRIC is planning to break ground on another experimental effort to conserve water while generating electricity: floating solar. Between its canal canopies and the new project that would float photovoltaic panels on a reservoir it is building, GRIC hopes to one day power all of its canal and irrigation operations with solar electricity, transforming itself into one of the most innovative and closely-watched water users in the West in the process. The Gila River Indian Community in Arizona lined 3,000 feet of canals with solar panels. [Photo: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News] The communitys investments come at a critical time for the Colorado River, which supplies water to about 40 million people across seven Western states, Mexico, and 30 tribes, including GRIC. Annual consumption from the river regularly exceeds its supply, and a decades-long drought, fueled in part by climate change, continues to leave water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead dangerously low. Covering water with solar panels is not a new idea. But for some it represents an elegant mitigation of water shortages in the West. Doing so could reduce evaporation, generate more carbon-free electricity, and require dams to run less frequently to produce power. But so far the technology has not been included in the ongoing Colorado River negotiations between the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada, tribes, and Mexico. All are expected to eventually agree on cuts to the systems water allocations to maintain the rivers ability to provide water and electricity for residents and farms, and keep its ecosystem alive. People in the U.S. dont know about [floating solar] yet, said Scott Young, a former policy analyst in the Nevada state legislatures counsel bureau. Theyre not willing to look at it and try and factor it into the negotiations. Several Western water managers Inside Climate News contacted for this story said they were open to learning more about floating solarColorado has even studied the technology through pilot projects. But, outside of GRICs project, none knew of any plans to deploy floating solar anywhere in the basin. Some listed costly and unusual construction methods and potentially modest water savings as the primary obstacles to floating solar maturing in the U.S. A Tantalizing Technology With Tradeoffs A winery in Napa County, California, deployed the first floating solar panels in the U.S. on an irrigation pond in 2007. The country was still years away from passing federal legislation to combat the climate crisis, and the technology matured here haltingly. As recently as 2022, according to a Bloomberg analysis, most of the worlds 13 gigawatts of floating solar capacity had been built in Asia. Unlike many Asian countries, the U.S. has an abundance of undeveloped land where solar could be constructed, said Prateek Joshi, a research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) who has studied floating solar, among other forms of energy. Even though [floating solar] may play a smaller role, I think its a critical role in just diversifying our energy mix and also reducing the burden of land use, he said. [Image: Paul Horn/Inside Climate News] This February, NREL published a study that found floating solar on the reservoirs behind federally owned dams could provide enough electricity to power 100 million U.S. homes annually, but only if all the developable space on each reservoir were used. Lake Powell could host almost 15 gigawatts of floating solar using about 23% of its surface area, and Lake Mead could generate over 17 gigawatts of power on 28% of its surface. Such large-scale development is probably not going to be the case, Joshi said, but even if a project used only a fraction of the developable area, theres a lot of power you could get from a relatively small percentage of these Colorado Basin reservoirs. The study did not measure how much water evaporation floating solar would prevent, but previous NREL research has shown that photovoltaic panelssometimes called floatovoltaics when they are deployed on reservoirscould also save water by changing the way hydropower is deployed. Some of a dams energy could come from solar panels floating on its reservoir to prevent water from being released solely to generate electricity. As late as December, when a typical Western dam would be running low, lakes with floating solar could still have enough water to produce hydropower, reducing reliance on more expensive backup energy from gas-fired power plants. Joshi has spoken with developers and water managers about floating solar before, and said there is an eagerness to get this [technology] going. The technology, however, is not flawless. Solar arras can be around 20% more expensive to install on water than land, largely because of the added cost of buoys that keep the panels afloat, according to a 2021 NREL report. The waters cooling effect can boost panel efficiency, but floating solar panels may produce slightly less energy than a similarly sized array on land because they cant be tilted as directly toward the sun as land-based panels. And while the panels likely reduce water loss from reservoirs, they may also increase a water bodys emissions of greenhouse gases, which in turn warm the climate and increase evaporation. This January, researchers at Cornell University found that floating solar covering more than 70% of a ponds surface area increased the waters CO2 and methane emissions. These kinds of impacts should be considered not only for the waterbody in which [floating solar] is deployed but also in the broader context of trade-offs of shifting energy production from land to water, the studys authors wrote. Any energy technology has its trade-offs, Joshi said, and in the case of floating solar, some of its benefitsreduced evaporation and land usemay not be easy to express in dollars and cents. Silver Buckshot There is perhaps no bigger champion for floating solar in the West than Scott Young. Before he retired in 2016, he spent much of his 18 years working for the Nevada Legislature researching the effects of proposed legislation, especially in the energy sector. On an overcast, blustery May day in southwest Wyoming near his home, Young said that in the past two years he has promoted the technology to Colorado River negotiators, members of Congress, environmental groups, and other water managers from the seven basin states, all of whom he has implored to consider the virtues of floating solar arrays on Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Young grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, about 40 miles, he estimated, from the pioneering floating solar panels in Napa. He stressed that he does not have any ties to industry; he is just a concerned Westerner who wants to diversify the regions energy mix and save as much water as possible. But so far, when he has been able to get someones attention, Young said his pitch has been met with tepid interest. Usually the response is: Eh, thats kind of interesting, said Young, dressed in a black jacket, a maroon button-down shirt and a matching ball cap that framed his round, open face. But theres no follow-up. The Bureau of Reclamation has not received any formal proposals for floating solar on its reservoirs, said an agency spokesperson, who added that the bureau has been monitoring the technology. In a 2021 paper published with NREL, Reclamation estimated that floating solar on its reservoirs could generate approximately 1.5 terawatts of electricity, enough to power about 100 million homes. But, in addition to potentially interfering with recreation, aquatic life, and water safety, floating solars effect on evaporation proved difficult to model broadly. So many environmental factors determine how water is lost or consumed in a reservoirsolar intensity, wind, humidity, lake circulation, water depth, and temperaturethat the studys authors concluded Reclamation should be wary of contractors claims of evaporation savings without site-specific studies. Those same factors affect the panels efficiency, and in turn, how much hydropower would need to be generated from the reservoir they cover. The report also showed the Colorado River was ripe with floating solar potentialmore than any other basin in the West. Thats particularly true in the Upper Basin, where Young has been heartened by Colorados approach to the technology. In 2023, the state passed a law requiring several agencies to study the use of floating solar. Last December, the Colorado Water Conservation Board published its findings, and estimated that the state could save up to 407,000 acre-feet of water by deploying floating solar on certain reservoirs. An acre-foot covers one acre with a foot of water, or 325,851 gallons, just about three years worth of water for a family of four. When Young saw the Colorado study quantifying savings from floating solar, he felt hopeful. 407,000 acre-feet from one state, he said. I was hoping that would catch peoples attention. Saving that much water would require using more than 100,000 acres of surface water, said Cole Bedford, the Colorado Water Conservation Boards chief operating officer, in an email. On some of these reservoirs a [floating solar] system would diminish the recreational value such that it would not be appropriate, he said. On others, recreation, power generation, and water savings could be balanced. Colorado is not planning to develop another project in the wake of this study, and Bedford said that the technology is not a silver bullet solution for Colorado River negotiations. While floating solar is one tool in the tool kit for water conservation, the only true solution to the challenges facing the Colorado River Basin is a shift to supply-driven, sustainable uses and operations, he said. Some of the Wests largest and driest cities, like Phoenix and Denver, ferry Colorado River water to residents hundreds of miles away from the basin using a web of infrastructure that must reliably operate in unforgiving terrain. Like their counterparts at the state level, water managers in these cities have heard floatovoltaics floated before, but they say the technology is currently too immature and costly to be deployed in the U.S. Lake Pleasant, which holds some of the Central Arizona Projects Colorado River water, is also a popular recreation space, complicating its floating solar potential. [Photo: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News] In Arizona, the Central Arizona Project (CAP) delivers much of the Colorado River water used by Phoenix, Tucson, tribes, and other southern Arizona communities with a 336-mile canal running through the desert, and Lake Pleasant, the companys 811,784-acre-foot reservoir. Though CAP is following GRICs deployment of solar over canals, it has no immediate plans to build solar over its canal, or Lake Pleasant, according to Darrin Francom, CAPs assistant general manager for operations, power, engineering, and maintenance, in part because the city of Peoria technically owns the surface water. Covering the whole canal with solar to save the 4,000 acre-feet that evaporates from it cold be prohibitively expensive for CAP. The dollar cost per that acre-foot [saved] is going to be in the tens of, you know, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars, Francom said, mainly due to working with novel equipment and construction methods. Ultimately, he continued, those costs are going to be borne by our ratepayers, which gives CAP reason to pursue other lower-cost ways to save water, like conservation programs, or to seek new sources. An intake tower moves water into and out of the dam at Lake Pleasant. [Photo: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News] The increased costs associated with building solar panels on water instead of on land has made such projects unpalatable to Denver Water, Colorados largest water utility, which moves water out of the Colorado River Basin and through the Rocky Mountains to customers on the Front Range. Floating solar doesnt pencil out for us for many reasons, said Todd Hartman, a company spokesperson. Were we to add more solar resourceswhich we are consideringwe have abundant land-based options. GRIC spent about $5.6 million, financed with Inflation Reduction Act grants, to construct 3,000 feet of solar over a canal, according to David DeJong, project director for the communitys irrigation district. Young is aware there is no single solution to the problems plaguing the Colorado River Basin, and he knows floating solar is not a perfect technology. Instead, he thinks of it as a silver buckshot, he said, borrowing a term from John Entsminger, general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authoritya technology that can be deployed alongside a constellation of behavioral changes to help keep the Colorado River alive. Given the duration and intensity of the drought in the West and the growing demand for water and clean energy, Young believes the U.S. needs to act now to embed this technology into the fabric of Western water management going forward. As drought in the West intensifies, I think more lawmakers are going to look at this, he said. If you can save water in two wayswhy not? Were Not Going to Know Until We Try If all goes according to plan, GRICs West Side Reservoir will be finished and ready to store Colorado River water by the end of July. The community wants to cover just under 60% of the lakes surface area with floating solar. Do we know for a fact that this is going to be 100% effective and foolproof? No, said DeJong, GRICs project director for its irrigation district. But were not going to know until we try. GRICs panels will have a few things going for them that projects on lakes Mead or Powell probably wouldnt. West Side Reservoir will not be open to recreation, limiting the panels impacts on people. And the community already has the fundsInflation Reduction Act grants and some of its own moneyto pay for the project. But GRICs solar ambitions may be threatened by the hostile posture toward solar and wind energy from the White House and congressional Republicans, and the project is vulnerable to an increasingly volatile economy. Since retaking office, President Donald Trump, aided by billionaire Elon Musk, has made deep cuts in renewable energy grants at the Environmental Protection Agency. It is unclear whether or to what extent the Bureau of Reclamation has slashed its grant programs. Under President Donald J. Trumps leadership, the department is working to cut bureaucratic waste and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently, said a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, which oversees Reclamation. This includes ensuring Bureau of Reclamation projects that use funds from the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act align with administration priorities. Projects are being individually assessed by period of performance, criticality, and other criteria. Projects have been approved for obligation under this process so that critical work can continue. And Trumps tariffs could cause costs to balloon beyond the communitys budget, which could either reduce the size of the array or cause delays in soliciting proposals, DeJong said. While the community will study the panels over canals to understand the waters effects on solar panel efficiency, it wont do similar research on the panels on West Side Reservoir, though DeJong said they have been in touch with NREL about studying them. The enterprise will be part of the system that may one day offset all the electrical demand and carbon footprint of GRICs irrigation system. The community, they love these types of innovative projects. I love these innovative projects, said GRIC Governor Stephen Roe Lewis, standing in front of the canals in April. Lewis had his dark hair pulled back in a long ponytail and wore a blue button down that matched the color of the sky. I know for a fact this is inspiring a whole new generation of water protectorsthose that want to come back and they want to go into this cutting-edge technology, he said. I couldnt be more proud of our team for getting this done. DeJong feels plenty of other water managers across the West could learn from what is happening at GRIC. In fact, the West Side Reservoir was intentionally constructed near Interstate 10 so that people driving by on the highway could one day see the floating solar the community intends to build there, DeJong said. It could be a paradigm shift in the Western United States, he said. We recognize all of the projects were doing are pilot projects. None of them are large scale. But its the beginning. By Jake Bolster, Inside Climate News This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News. It is republished with permission. Sign up for the ICN newsletter here.
Category:
E-Commerce
Inside the historic Book Depository at Michigan Central, now home to Newlabs innovation campus, Brittanie Dabney is quietly building a different kind of startup. Her company, EcoSphere Organics, doesnt make apps or mobility tech. It makes biodegradable coasters out of banana peels. Dabney and her team collect food scraps from local restaurants like Alchemy and Johnnys Speakeasycoffee grounds, citrus rinds, and eggshellsand process them into small-batch products like compostable packaging and plant-based leather alternatives. Using dehydration and fermentation, Dabney aims to create materials that are both functional and regenerative. I want the vision of our process and manufacturing to be sustainable, Dabney says. No harsh chemicals, not water-intensive. A coaster made from grapefruit peels at Ecosphere Organics in their NewLab workspace. [Photo: Nick Hagen/Planet Detroit/courtesy Next City] EcoSphere is still in early development, operating with grant funding and limited access to production space. Once were able to get warehouse space, then well be able to take on more, she says. The company is part of a growing movement in Michigan to look beyond composting. With 745,000 tons of food waste landfilled in Michigan every year, theyre exploring alternatives: upcycling, food rescue, apps, and decentralized infrastructure that can transform waste into something more useful. EPA data identifies more than 10,000 food service establishments across Michigan generating significant amounts of food waste, with an estimated total of over 167,000 tons per day. These range from school cafeterias and restaurants to correctional facilities and healthcare institutions, each with unique waste patterns and constraints. The most frequently listed facility type is full-service restaurants, which account for more than 5,000 sites in the data set. Other common sources include cafeterias, limited-service restaurants, and food service contractors. Wayne County alone accounts for the most food waste, with more than 177,0000 pounds of average daily waste across facilities, followed by Genesee, Kent, Macomb, and Oakland counties. This diversity underscores the need for flexible, localized strategiestechnologies and programs that can intervene at grocery stores, restaurants, institutions, and beyond. The innovations emerging in Michigan represent promising steps, but broader adoption and investment will be necessary to meaningfully reduce food waste statewide. Flashfood app: Where retail tech meets waste reduction While startups like EcoSphere are experimenting with banana peels and coffee grounds, larger players are tackling food waste at the point of sale. In Michigan, one of the most visible interventions comes from Flashfood, a mobile app that lets shoppers buy groceries nearing their sell-by date at a discountand from Meijer, the first U.S. retailer to partner with the platform. Meijer was actually our first U.S. customer, says Esther Cohn, a spokesperson for Canada-based Flashfood. Michigan was a natural next step because we already had a strong user base and Meijers scale gave us a way to grow quickly. The model is straightforward: store staff scan soon-to-expire itemsmeat, dairy, produceinto the app, offering them at steep discounts. Customers place orders on their phones and pick them up from coolers near the store entrance. The goal is to keep food out of landfills and into shopping carts. From a grocers perspective, youre making money back on items you used to throw away, Cohn says. Youre reducing shrink and avoiding disposal costs. Shrink refers to inventory loss from damage and spoilage. As of late 2023, Meijer customers had diverted more than 10 million pounds of food waste from landfills using the app, according to the companys corporate impact report. The program began in 2021. Meijer also became the first U.S. retailer to accept SNAP/EBT payments through Flashfood, expanding access to lower-cost groceries. Flashfood users purchase items through the app and pick them up in the store. [Photo: Nick Hagen/Planet Detroit/courtesy Next City] But the program requires infrastructure that many smaller grocers dont have: digital inventory systems, trained staff, and coordinated logistics. Even at Meijer, implementation takes planning. Were looking at multiple tools to address food waste, says Erik Petrovskis, Meijers director of environmental compliance and sustainability. That includes reducing waste at the source, diverting what we can, and making sure as little as possible ends up in a landfill. Volunteer-powered logistics: Food Rescue US in Michigan In a parking lot outside a Whole Foods store in Midtown Detroit, Janet Damian loads trays of bread, cut-up sweet potatoes, some pies, and pineapple into the back of her Ford Flex. This isnt a city-run program. Its one of more than 500 monthly rescues coordinated by Food Rescue US-Detroit, a tech-enabled nonprofit that redirects surplus food from stores and restaurants to food pantries, shelters, and fridges across Southeast Michigan. Elli Chivari, 22, and Jessica Awan, 19, bring carts with donated food from Food Rescue US to the WSU Food Pantry. [Photo: Nick Hagen/Planet Detroit/courtesy Next City] We rescue any type of foodfresh, frozen, prepared, nonperishable, says Darraugh Collins, who runs the organizations Michigan operations. Sometimes its a whole carload. Sometimes its just a few bags. The model relies on a lightweight infrastructure: a mobile app, a flexible network of 80 to 100 active volunteers, and over 144 food donor partners, including Target, Whole Foods, Plum Market, and LinkedIn. In 2024, the Detroit program alone rescued about 700,000 pounds of food, delivering it to more than 147 recipient agenciesmany of them in the city, even though most food comes from outside its limits. One of those volunteers is Janet Damian, a retired medical administrator who lives in Dearborn and picks up food weekly from Whole Foods and other locations. Were reducing food waste by distributing it to people who need it, she says. Its satisfying because the need is realand the appreciation is real. Her favorite moment? Delivering 30 birthday cakes from Whole Foods to the Wayne State student pantry. Their eyes lit up, she says. It was like a party. It doesnt matter what you bring, theyre just happy someones thinking about them. That joy is familiar to Kenya Maxey, who oversees the Wayne State pantry, which also includes a thrift shop. Weve seen over 6,700 students in the last 12 weeks, she says. The numbers started climbing in January. Maxey said the donations from Food Rescue US make their limited budget stretch further, and offer students a moment of normalcy. They get to shop like theyre in a grocery store, she says. And that helps them feel like themselves. Despite its reach, the model has limits. Were at capacity with the volunteers we have, Collins says. We need more funding, more drivers and ideally some paid positions to help us coordinate. The need is only growing. This story was originally published by nonprofit news organizations Planet Detroit and Next City through the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship, as part of a series investigating how Michigans food waste system contributes to climate change through landfill methane emissions.
Category:
E-Commerce
Everyones always talking about new tools, but some of the best tools are the classic onesincredibly useful things that have been around for ages. These are the tools that have stood the test of time and are just as handy today as they were 20 years ago. They’re also the kinds of things you wont hear about from most people or publications. And it’s easy to see why: Theyre not the hot new thing. Theyre just quietly helpful for anyone in the know. So today, lets take a look at one of those web-wide classics. It’s the ideal way to tell, in an instant, whether a website is actually down or not. Ive used it for nearly two decades, and I still rely on it regularly. 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! Is it down for everyoneor just for me? Sometimes, no matter what you do, a website just won’t load. The question is obvious: Wait, is the website actually down for everyone? Or will it just not load for me for some reason? Its an important question to ask. Sometimes, the problem may very well be with your computer, phone, or internet connection. Other times, the website may indeed be completely down for everyone. And these days? It can even be somewhere in between: A website might go down only for people in your region but be accessible elsewhere at the same time. The way to get to the bottom of whatever’s going on is with a simple little site called Down for Everyone or Just Me. To use it, just pull up the site in your browser of choiceon your phone, computer, or any other web-connected contraption. Then, plug in a website addressan address like fastcompany.com or theintelligence.com, a social media service, the name of an app, or anything else that doesnt appear to be working right. Plug in any website’s address to answer the age-old question: Is it down for everyone, or just for me? Youll learn whether the website appears to be down for everyoneor just for you. And its not only a one-way interaction, either: You can also report what youre seeing. And you can see what problems other people have reported recently, too. It really is that simpleno accounts, no paid subscriptions, and nothing but a few ads on a single page. Itll help you troubleshoot website connection problems in a snap, exactly as it has since the internet’s early era. You can access Down for Everyone or Just Me directly in your browser. Its completely freethe website just has a few ads and accepts donations. You dont have to provide any private information, and the privacy policy says the service wont sell your personal data. Ready for more tech-enhancing treasures? Check out my free Cool Tools newsletter for an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in delightful waysand another off-the-beaten-path gem in your inbox every Wednesday!
Category:
E-Commerce
2012. I walk out of a gastroenterologists office with a brochure titled Your Life With Ulcerative Colitis. What the brochure doesnt say: A month later, I will wake up on the day of a critical midyear design presentation feeling too nauseous to leave my apartment, and will have to spend several weeks at my parents house, where I will miss several more midterms. A year later, Ill stand at a boarding gate and feel too sick to take a five-hour flight and meet with potential graduate school advisers. Ill soon learn that, for me, these wont be one-offs. Instead, Ill live a life of constant flux, impossible to plan for. Desperate for some control as I push through academia, I turn to tech products. But technology cant help me. Digital tools excel at routines, but falter at exceptions. I can schedule weeks of meetings in a few clicks, but when Im unwell, Im copy-pasting the same cancellation message a dozen times. My personal-finance app keeps me on track, but only until an urgent-care bill throws things off. When my fitness tracker chastises me for not closing my rings during a particularly brutal flare-up, I shove it into my junk drawer. Technology is failing me when I need it the most. Happy paths 2016. I join Big Tech, working as a user researcher in early-stage and AI technology. Two things become immediately clear. First, my story is far from unique. Anecdotes from many hundreds of user interviews reflect lives riddled with chaos and disruption. Changeunplanned and plannedis the norm. Second, consumer products are largely designed for happy paths. A clear-cut problem is solved by a superhero technology, resulting in a favorable outcome that is tied off with a neat bow. For the sake of clarity, efficiency, and technical ease, the zigzag realities of lives are often sanitized into an idealized arc. We trot out these squeaky clean stories as hero use cases for a product ideafirst to convince ourselves, then our executives, and, finally, our users. Todays explosion of consumer-facing GenAI products are built with the same recipe. We get heartstring-tugging stories with just enough complexity to feel real, without any of the mess. A dad uses AI to prepare for a job interview while reminiscing on parenthood. A parent brings a childs imaginary creature to life in a custom picture book. Some brands try to incorporate more chaotic realities (a storm hits restaurant patio seating) only to portray absurd overdependence on AI (waiters leave their customers drenched because an AI agent doesnt reseat them indoors). If youre like me, these ads make you want to scream: Youre standing in the middle of the kitchen. How are your kids not interrupting your conversation with AI 27 times? But in contrast to the hero use case, taking kid snack breaks and asking AI to repeat itself over the noise of toddler screams are often cordoned off as edge cases in product development. The implication: These occurrences are rare. But they arent. Human journeys are not straight lines. They are dynamic, defined by change, interruptions, and curveballs. Some 60% of Americans reported experiencing an unexpected expense in the past year, though 42% dont have an emergency fund greater than $1,000. Households with two or more children have a viral infection in the household more than 50% of the time. And an estimated 28% of work time each year is lost to distractions. When technology isnt resilient to this reality, it breakssometimes catastrophically. Like when a Florida teen dies by suicide after his lengthy conversations with a Character.ai chatbot turn darkly romantic. When AI-powered cameras mounted on public buses mistakenly ticket thousands of legally parked vehicles in New York because they fail to recognize alternate side zones. Or when AI weather models fail to predict the worst storms because extreme weather data doesnt exist in the training data. These outcomes are extreme, but the pathways leading there are deeply ordinary, broken by nascent technology that isnt resilient to the gritty reality of human behavior. Sometimes, the catalyst stems from the tech itself, like security vulnerabilities. Other times, its agnostic of the technology, like mental health. But in all cases, the technology was not resilient to changes in context. AI’s broken promise Years ago, you could blame technology as the limiting factor. But AI should, ideally, thrive on this sort of complexityusing its superpowers of pattern recognition, synthesis, and triangulation of thousands of data points about users and their environment. GenAI has introduced a new frontier around deep reasoning and human interaction that should make the technology more tractable and transparent. AI is uniquely positioned to help people anticipate and recover from change, the kind that they may not have seen coming. Yet the Character.ai system didnt raise the alarm when a conversation overtly turned dangerous, much less recognize patterns that may suggest that it was headed that way. On issuing its 7,000th ticket in one day, the MTAs system didnt flag that this is an unusually large number of violations on a route. Its never easy to deal with the complex behavior of humans and societies. But when we keep designing to make already great lives 1% better, we are perpetuating a specific type of harmone that happens when the people designing the technology arent considering the real ways it might be used. As UX practitioners, we are uniquely positioned to start the conversation about how to change this. To move toward an AI UX rooted in resilience, well need to shepherd at least three main shifts in the way our products are designed. 1. Shift the user stories we tellwhich directly map to the problems we choose to solve. UX must choose to foreground the hard, complex story. We all have one: a multigenerational household with life-stage changes, moves across the country, divorce, job loss, a chronic illness. Right now, a key barrier to centering these stories is that they extend ideation cycles, which is uncomfortable in an increasingly launch-first-or-perish climate. As a result, cleaner stories, like the product narratives described earlier, win out. To break this cycle, UX can introduce complex user stories to product teams starting with ideation, through prototype and concept testingespecially ones that cut horizontally across product ecosystems. This requires creating a new canon: an accessible taxonomy of types of complexity, curveballs, and changes that we can easily pull from. Such a taxonomy might take the form of brainstorming prompts, user journey templates, or a card deck or visualization used in sprints. This cracking open will take time, but the more we tell these stories, the easier thy will roll off the tongue, and the more they can become normalized. 2. Shift how we leverage user data in AI-powered products. Today, user data collected by companieswhile wide-rangingisnt always curated or connected well. Most users, particularly younger generations, have resigned themselves to data collection and dont mind it, but also dont understand how the data is used or whether it benefits them. This is not an argument to collect more data. Rather, its a call to connect existing data for more meaningful, tangible user benefits, like helping navigate blind spots and complexity. Consider a simple example: Anns AI agent has access to a calendar app where she has blocked off time for a post-work run, a weather app that shows unexpected evening rain showers, and a maps app that she frequently uses to navigate to a yoga studio. This agent can now surface a timely suggestion: help Ann move meetings to shift the run to earlier in the day, or help her find a class at the yoga studio at that time. In reflecting how people really use their technology, this sort of cross-product dialogue and synthesis has the opportunity to leverage AI and user data to unlock resilience in the face of change. 3. Shift away from traditional definitions of seamlessness and magic moments toward ones that gracefully embrace failure, meaningful friction, and deep, explicit user feedback. AI advancements tend to tempt product teams to remove all friction and present users with auto-magical solutions to needs they werent even aware of, from hyper-personalized AI-driven ads to smart nudges on food and shopping apps. Common success metrics used today reflect the value we place on frictionless experiences: fewer clicks, greater session length, engagement with automation features, fewer user-submitted comments. This can cause a misleading overreliance on implicit behavioral signals that dont always reflect real intent. Take the example of an in-app pop-up: A user might spend a long time viewing it, even clicking on a linknot because they find it useful but because they cant find the exit. Even when users do provide explicit feedback, its often not in a form that can be interpreted meaningfully, leading to undesired outcomes. Think, for example, of how OpenAIs models grew sycophantic after a thumbs-up on a response was used as a signal to make the chatbot behave more in that direction. Instead, how might we offer users more ways to provide granular feedback that can shed light not only on the what but also the why? This can be meaningful friction that can empower users to have their unique human context be better understood while harnessing the beyond-human capabilities of AI. One could argue that this, in fact, is the more magical experience. Finally, the pursuit of seamless perfection risks underplaying the shortcomings of AI itselfmisunderstood accents, factual inaccuracies, biased imagery. These are a function of the technology, and are bound to happen. UX needs to treat these as predictable breaking points in the technology, build frameworks to classify them, and design intentionally with them as part of the user narrative. Of course, its far simpler to sketch these solutions than implement them, but if AI is to work well for real-world problems, we need to tackle real-world complexity head-on. UX is in a powerful position to shift these mindsets. As it has done for domains like accessibility and product inclusion, UX can redefine the problems and narratives that emerging technology is built for, and reshape the UX to accommodate product and user realities to support resilience. Are we brave enough to get into the messy weeds and do it?
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