Rose Eveleth | Vox

The biggest lie tech people tell themselves — and the rest of us

2023-02-28T23:41:05-05:00

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Imagine you’re taking an online business class — the kind where you watch video lectures and then answer questions at the end. But this isn’t a normal class, and you’re not just watching the lectures: They’re watching you back. Every time the facial recognition system decides that you look bored, distracted, or tuned out, it makes a note. And after each lecture, it only asks you about content from those moments.

This isn’t a hypothetical system; it’s a real one deployed by a company called Nestor. And if you don’t like the sound of it, you’re not alone. Neither do the actual students.

When I asked the man behind the system, French inventor Marcel Saucet, how the students in these classes feel about being watched, he admitted that they didn’t like it. They felt violated and surveilled, he said, but he shrugged off any implication that it was his fault. “Everybody is doing this,” he told me. “It’s really early and shocking, but we cannot go against natural laws of evolution.”

As a reporter who covers technology and the future, I constantly hear variations of this line as technologists attempt to apply the theory Charles Darwin made famous in biology to their own work. I’m told that there is a progression of technology, a movement that is bigger than any individual inventor or CEO. They say they are simply caught in a tide, swept along in a current they cannot fight. They say it inevitably leads them to facial recognition (now even being deployed on children), smart speakers that record your intimate conversations, and doorbells that narc on your neighbors. They say we can’t blame these companies for the erosion of privacy or democracy or trust in public institutions — that was all going to happen sooner or later.

“When have we ever been able to keep the genie in the bottle?” they ask. Besides, they argue, people buy this stuff so they must want it. Companies are simply responding to “natural selection” by consumers. There is nobody to blame for this, they say. It’s as natural as gravity.

No natural process is creating a “smart” hairbrush

Perhaps no one states this belief more clearly than inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: “The ongoing acceleration of technology is the implication and inevitable result of what I call the law of accelerating returns, which describes the acceleration of the pace of and the exponential growth of the products of an evolutionary process.”

In fact, our world is shaped by humans who make decisions, and technology companies are no different.

To claim that these devices are the result of some kind of ever-improving natural process not only misunderstands how evolution works, but it also suggests that everything from biological weapons to fraudulent startups like Theranos to Juicero (the $400 machine that squeezed juice out of packets) are necessary and natural.

While these “innovations” range from the dangerous to the silly, they share a common thread: Nothing about them is “natural.” No natural process is creating a “smart” hairbrush or a “smart” flip flop or a “smart” condom. Or a Bluetooth-enabled toaster, a cryptocurrency from a photography company, or an internet-connected air freshener.

Evolution is a terrible metaphor for technology

Technologists’ desire to make a parallel to evolution is flawed at its very foundation. Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. (And while some inventions may indeed be the result of mishaps, the decision of a company to patent, produce, and market those inventions is not.) Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment, the customer base. Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered.

In some situations, even if we can’t literally put a technological genie back in a bottle, we can artificially intervene to make sure the genie plays by specific rules.

Evolution is driven by mistakes, not plans

There are clear laws about what companies can and can’t do in the realm of biological weapons. The FDA ensures drugs are tested for efficacy and safety before they can be sold. The USDA ensures new food research is done with care. We don’t let anybody frack or drill for oil or build nuclear power plants wherever they like. We don’t let just anybody make and sell cars or airplanes or guns.

So the assertion that technology companies can’t possibly be shaped or restrained with the public’s interest in mind is to argue that they are fundamentally different from any other industry. They’re not.

This idea persists in part because Americans cannot resist the allure of “progress”

In many ways, the American tech mogul blaming some invisible arc of innovation for his choices is simply an echo of the very ethos that founded America: progress at all costs. The men and women who colonized America largely saw progress as a march, a continual straight path, forward at all times, never to be questioned or slowed. Benjamin Franklin (himself an inventor) once wrote: “The rapid progress true science now makes occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter.”

So to suggest a slowing — or perhaps even (god forbid) a reverse — seems antithetical to the fabric of America. When former Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski says, “What already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow,” he is echoing the sentiments of our nation’s founders.

“These arguments for corporate supremacy and technological progress are so deeply connected in the American mind,” says Luke Stark, a researcher who studies behavior and computing at Microsoft Research Montreal. “It’s really tied to the whole American manifest destiny and the broader history of American settler colonialism.” The attitude is that we must march on, forward, westward, no matter what stands in our way. Going back is simply not an option.

Even those afraid of all-seeing corporations argue that instead of pressing pause, we, the consumers, must simply move forward more quickly. “What I try to focus on is not to try to stop the march of technological progress,” Yuval Noah Harari, a historian and the author of Sapiens, told Time magazine. “Instead, I try to run faster.”

“It’s really tied to the whole American manifest destiny”

This endless, punishing race in the name of “progress” is often what drives consumer behavior, too. Despite the “American dream” — security, safety, prosperity — being more and more out of reach for everyday Americans, the idea that it’s just around the corner drives people to purchase these products.

If you have the newest app, people think their lives will be easier, you’ll have more free time, more quality time. Commercials promise more backyard barbecues under sparklers and birthday surprise parties facilitated by internet-connected light bulbs.

And when we buy the products, tech companies take that as a green light to continue on their “inevitable” path, inching ever toward a world where Amazon knows exactly what you’re doing, thinking, feeling — perhaps even before you do. “It’s all a loop,” says Stark. “It’s weird. That’s what puts people in this bind. They think they should be able to have it all. They can’t, and technology is a kind of prophylactic to cope with this stuff.”

Perhaps the most telling place this kind of loop shows up is in the high-tech baby device market: Bluetooth diapers, internet-connected baby monitors, an anklet that keeps track of your infant’s every move, heartbeat, and temperature fluctuation. In a country with an ever-eroding social safety net, parents are sold these surveillance devices under the guise of care and love, with a healthy dash of paranoia.

As Stark writes in his paper on consumers who surveil their loved ones, “Parents (in particular mothers) have long been reminded by advertisers that their children are at risk — from external threats, poor nutrition, social exclusion, the mother’s own failures as a parent — and that their surest route to protecting their children, and ameliorating their (newly provoked) anxiety about these dangers, is consumption.”

Buying this device, even if the details are a bit creepy, shows that you care, that you’re a good parent. And because parents are shamed and nudged into buying these tracking devices, more and more of them pop up on the market. It’s these purchases that technologists equate to “natural selection,” but it’s nearly impossible for most people to opt out of a lot of these arrangements.

With great power comes great responsibility

Often consumers don’t have much power of selection at all. Those who run small businesses find it nearly impossible to walk away from Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, Etsy, even Amazon. Employers often mandate that their workers use certain apps or systems like Zoom, Slack, and Google Docs. “It is only the hyper-privileged who are now saying, ‘I’m not going to give my kids this,’ or, ‘I’m not on social media,’” says Rumman Chowdhury, a data scientist at Accenture. “You actually have to be so comfortable in your privilege that you can opt out of things.”

And so we’re left with a tech world claiming to be driven by our desires when those decisions aren’t ones that most consumers feel good about. There’s a growing chasm between how everyday users feel about the technology around them and how companies decide what to make. And yet, these companies say they have our best interests in mind. We can’t go back, they say. We can’t stop the “natural evolution of technology.” But the “natural evolution of technology” was never a thing to begin with, and it’s time to question what “progress” actually means.

Rose Eveleth is a writer and producer who explores how humans tangle with science and technology. She’s the creator and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about possible (and not so possible) futures.

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As air pollution gets worse, a dystopian accessory is born

2020-01-30T18:58:50-05:00

Air filtering masks are already popular across Asia, but will they become common in the US? | Sarah Lawrence for Vox

Last fall, two different wildfires destroyed huge swaths of California. The Camp Fire in Northern California covered 153,336 acres, destroyed nearly 20,000 structures, and killed 85 people; it also left a shroud of smoke and ash hovering over the area. Public schools in five Bay Area counties were closed, and residents were warned to stay inside and protect their lungs from the dangerous air quality. Stores for miles around sold out of everything from surgical masks to the recommended N95 painter’s masks — the only kind that can effectively filter 95 percent of the tiny particles that do the most damage to your lungs.

Walking around the Bay Area in the weeks following the Camp Fire felt like living in a dystopian future — the sky a matte grey, the sun a red, alien-like orb, the streets empty save a handful of souls, nearly all wearing painter’s masks or bandannas or scarves over their mouths. Those two weeks might have been not just a dark blip, but rather a glimpse into our collective future. And there are entrepreneurs poised to capitalize on it. Because in the tomorrow that the Camp Fire portends, we’re all going to need a good face mask.

The global future of air quality doesn’t look so good. As humanity continues to make little progress fighting climate change, fires are expected to get more frequent. And in some cases, like in California, that new pollution is erasing decades of improving air quality.

The American Lung Association estimates that 133.9 million people in the United States are exposed to unhealthy air conditions every year. The World Health Organization estimates that 4.2 million people die every year from exposure to air pollution. A recent report from IQAir, a group that surveys air pollution worldwide, highlighted the cities with the worst pollution, many of which were located in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Most of this air pollution comes from industry and other emissions.

And then there’s the dust. All around the world, deserts are expanding. “The desert is creeping and nobody is noticing,” says Sumant Nigam, who recently published a study that found that the Sahara has expanded by 10 percent over the past century, largely due to climate change. “And eventually, it will swallow you.”

The Sahara isn’t the only desert that’s been creeping. The Gobi Desert in China has been expanding by almost 10 miles every year. The Kalahari Desert in southern Africa is growing, as is the Maowusu Desert in China, and the Great Sandy Desert in Australia. The southwestern US is seeing drier conditions and a creeping desert landscape. And climate models suggest that at our current rate of climate change, deserts could expand by 34 percent globally. That’s 5.2 million square miles.

133.9 million people in the United States are exposed to unhealthy air conditions every year

With increased desertification comes an increased risk of dust-borne diseases. Dust storms have been linked to outbreaks of valley fever, whooping cough, Kawasaki disease, and meningitis.

But what is the average person supposed to do when the air around them is no longer safe to breathe? “It’s just impractical to tell people: ‘Don’t go outside. Don’t breathe,’” says Morgan Gorris, a PhD candidate at UC Irvine who researches valley fever and dust storms.

Enter the face mask, an accessory ripe for the market in these dystopian times. People who live in desert areas have long known to cover their mouths and protect their lungs from dust. But in the past few years, a handful of companies have started making air filtration masks engineered specifically for both fashion and function. In California, a company called Vogmask has all but cornered the market with its brightly colored designs. And abroad, companies like Airpop and Respro are entering the fold, hoping to provide an attractive alternative to the standard white painter’s mask. But how does a new accessory category take off — especially one that covers a good portion of a wearer’s face?

Some parts of the world already have a huge head start here. People in Korea, Japan, and parts of China regularly wear what are often called “courtesy masks” — surgical masks worn to prevent their germs from infecting others. “It’s considered a polite thing to wear if you’re sick,” says Christina Xu, a researcher who studies cultural trends in the US and China. Xu points out that the density of the urban environments in these countries likely contributes to the masks’ popularity. “You’re protecting yourself from this hyper-dense, hyper-concentrated urban environment, and frankly, there are just way more of those places in China and Japan and Korea, and in Asia in general, than there are in the US, where we tend to be a little bit more spread out except for on the coasts.”

In these Asian countries, courtesy masks are common enough that pop stars even influence the styles — when bands started wearing black masks instead of the usual white ones, the trend spread to the masses. But these masks do nothing to filter out particulate matter like dust or pollution, and the PM2.5 masks that do that kind of filtering still aren’t nearly as popular.

Airpop, a Chinese company that makes face masks, is trying to change that. Founded by Chris Hosmer, the company set out not only to make a high-quality mask but to fix a design problem they identified with the masks already on the market. “They made a mask that actually fits on East Asian faces, because the other masks are designed for Caucasian faces and often don’t actually seal properly,” says Xu. Hosmer explains that most mask-making companies in China simply import all their parameters from the United States, using headforms based on Western faces.

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And a poor fit in this case isn’t just annoying — if a protective air mask doesn’t fit just right, it’s almost counterproductive. Due to physics, any gap in the seal acts like a straw, sucking the harmful particles directly into your mouth.

To fix this, Hosmer and his team partnered with a researcher at Hong Kong Polytechnic University that was already doing a big facial biometrics scanning project, and used that data to create a mask that actually fit the average East Asian face. In China, the masks are approved by the China Occupational Safety & Health Association all the way down to PM0.3, almost 10 times smaller than the standard PM2.5 masks. But when Airpop sent the mask to the United States for third-party testing, the team saw strange results. What they finally realized was that for the “fit” part of the test, where real people wear the mask and perform various tasks, American labs were using almost exclusively Caucasians. Eventually, they decided to simply forgo American certifications and focus on the Chinese market.

Today, Airpop masks are sold all over China as well as online for $50. They come in a variety of colors and look more like a fancy Nike shoe than a surgeon’s protective covering. And Airpop is not alone. A company called Freka sells stylish masks for more than $100 apiece. Lifestyle bloggers in places like China and India even review masks as fashion items.

Shilpa Gandotra, an Indian woman who writes a blog called Our External World, told me she still wears the Vogmask she reviewed in 2016. “Diwali time in India is the height of pollution, so that is one time frame where the mask is essential,” she told me. “I literally carry this mask in my purse so that whenever I need it, I can wear it and save myself from bad-quality air.” But in the United States, there might be more of a hurdle to get people to wear masks in the first place.

During the Camp Fire, Vogmask, a local Northern California company (which sells its masks for $33 to $44 each), found itself inundated with orders — co-founder Wendover Brown told me that their sales increased to 10 times their normal level. But Vogmask has been selling its colorful air filtration masks since 2011, after one fateful day at Burning Man. “When we first conjured the idea, we were wearing bandanas to protect ourselves from the dust,” says Marc Brown, Wendover’s son and co-founder. “And other people were wearing white painter’s masks, and it occurred to me to make real dust masks that looked as nice as bandanas.”

In those early days, Vogmask had little competition from American manufacturers. “We were able to try whatever we wanted for a while. People bought whatever we made,” Marc says. He experimented with putting glitch-inspired images on the masks, along with artwork like Mondrian and the work of Dada artists. “It didn’t matter what we did because we sold out of everything anyway.”

But they soon learned that people didn’t necessarily want bold, bright, and eye-catching designs. And Marc refined a set of design rules that work for the company: no faces (“it just looks really creepy and it turns it into a Halloween thing”), no polka dots (“it makes someone look like they have a disease or outbreak on their face”), and nothing scary (“our ethos is trying to make people happy”).

Today, Wendover says the company’s best-selling masks are still the less flashy ones — a mask called Hero, made up of a series of black and gray triangles, consistently outperforms all the rest. “It’s less threatening than a solid black mass and yet is super professional-looking.” She also told me they can see some cultural trends in what sells best where. “In China, we had a lot of success with animal patterns, the blue and pink panda designs. In the US, that doesn’t sell well at all.”

These masks are still niche in the United States. Right now, Vogmask is working to update its packaging, to signal that its products are something permanent and more luxurious. “We’re going to make a more high-quality box,” says Marc, “and we’re going to improve the materials of the product itself so that it feels like a more expensive item that you invest in.” They hope that with a good enough design, they can convince even American customers these masks are worth the money.

And there’s an accessory these brands can look to as a historical example. “If sunglasses didn’t exist today and you were going to pitch an investor on sunglasses, you would sound insane,” Hosmer says. “‘Hey, we’re gonna put this thing that covers, like, the window to your soul, the most communicative part of your body; we’re gonna put something in front of it so that you can’t see it, and that thing is gonna essentially be able to protect you from your environment.’ They would be like, ‘What? That’s stupid. No one’s gonna do that!’” Masks are no different, he says.

Xu also pointed to sunglasses when I asked her about the issues Americans might have with covering up their faces. “I’m not actually someone who likes to wear sunglasses,” she said. “And I’m struck by how common it is for people to cover up one of the more expressive parts of their face all the time.” How different are masks, really?

“If sunglasses didn’t exist today and you were going to pitch an investor on sunglasses, you would sound insane”

Taking sunglasses as precedent could also reveal how the adoption of masks might play out. “Designer sunglasses went from being something that was very luxury menswear to luxury womenswear,” Xu says. Eventually, sunglasses branched out into all kinds of forms: sleek, bedazzled, futuristic, bright, athletic. “All of those are still sunglasses and still fashionable, just in very different ways of expressing who the wearer is.” And, like sunglasses, some masks will be cheap and not really work to protect you, while others will be expensive, luxurious items that you keep for years.

The near-future of this accessory could depend on who picks up the object first. Xu says she could see it going a few ways: It could be adopted by streetwear fans (Supreme already sells a face mask, although it doesn’t seem to actually do much in the way of safety or filtration) or by users who prefer the Burning Man aesthetic. Or perhaps the wellness world adopts these masks, in which case the product design would look quite different. “The other direction might be the sort of Lululemon-ification of the masks, if they’re treated as these essential wellness objects and they enter the world of performance fabrics and athleisure and athletic wear,” Xu says. Think Goop or Fabletics, but for face masks.

It’s possible that the biggest challenge facing face masks isn’t the fashion at all, but rather convincing people they’re necessary. In some countries, air pollution is a hot-button political issue as well as a health problem. China, for example, spent years denying it had an air pollution problem at all, attempting to convince its citizens to disbelieve their eyes and lungs. Despite a decade of visible air pollution in cities like Beijing, China only declared an air quality “Red Alert,” signaling that the air quality was particularly hazardous for more than three days in a row, for the first time in 2015.

In India, the country with the world’s most polluted air, even doctors have told people not to wear masks despite the poor air quality. “Dr Manoj Kumar Goel, Director of Pulmonary and Critical Care Department at Fortis Healthcare, Gurgaon, tells us that it’s not time to start wearing a face mask yet,” says India Express. (There’s also the very real fact that many people in India cannot afford a $40, or even $5, face mask.)

Hosmer thinks the longer-term future of air masks is higher-tech that today’s filtration devices. “It’s definitely a little Black Mirror-ish and ‘the apocalypse is nigh’-ish, but sensors are getting cheap enough and high enough fidelity that imagining products that read and report environmental health in real time is not crazy anymore,” he says. In the future, these masks may be outfitted with tiny sensors that detect everything from hazardous chemicals to the electric fields nearby. And with all that additional data, Hosmer thinks people will better understand the kinds of risks our environment might pose. “So there will gradually be a familiarity with, if not an acceptance of, knowing what the invisible threats to your and your family’s health and well-being are.”

In the future, we’ll know a lot more about what we’re breathing. That fact alone might usher in the era of the mask.

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The Science and Tech Behind Period Underwear

2019-03-06T05:13:03-05:00

If teen magazines are to be believed, period accidents can happen to anyone, at any time, to extreme effect. While many of the stories of errant tampons or leaky pads printed in those magazines are likely embellished, any person who’s had a period knows that even thorough preparation doesn’t guarantee a life without leaks or stains or slips. Many people even have “period underwear” — a generally ratty pair of panties you don’t mind getting ruined. But in the last few years several new companies have cropped up, offering underwear to help hold pads, wick moisture, and even replace tampons. Here’s how they work.

Read the rest of this post on the original site. »

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Why Are Sports Bras So Terrible?

2018-10-04T03:05:04-04:00

Photo: Nike/Brittany Holloway-Brown

The first thing to know about sports and breasts is this: women have always participated in athletics, bra or no bra. In ancient Rome, women bound their breasts with cloth and leather. Pottery and mosaics from the fourth and fifth centuries show female athletes wearing bikini-like uniforms.

In the Victorian era, women turned to corsets to keep their breasts from moving too much. Those competing at Wimbledon in 1887 returned to their dressing rooms in between matches to “unhitch their bloody corsets,” having been “repeatedly stabbed by the metal and whale bone stays of the cumbersome garments” as they played.

By 1911, women got a “sports corset” with flexible material, and thanks to the 1914 tango craze, someone even invented a dancing corset. But it wasn’t until the 1920s that bras started to replace corsets in the United States, and while brassieres designed for athletic purposes were patented as early as 1906, they simply never caught on.

Finally, in 1977 — the same year Victoria’s Secret was founded — the sports bra as we know it was invented by Lisa Lindahl and Polly Smith, with the help of designer and runner Hinda Miller. That first sports bra was simply two jockstraps sewn together. It wasn’t just that jockstraps were the right size, they were also the right idea. “We said, what we really need to do is what men have been doing: pull everything close to the body,” Miller later told researchers. They called this new bra the Jockbra, but quickly changed it to Jogbra after store owners in South Carolina deemed the name offensive.

During its first year on the market, Jogbra moved 25,000 units. Two decades later, in 1998, the sports bra industry sold $412 million worth of product. A 2002 study estimated that sports bras accounted for about 6 percent of the then-$4.5 billion bra market. Today, the bra market is worth about $15 billion. Factor in that female participation in sports is increasing every year and athleisure appears to be here to stay, and it’s no wonder that from Lululemon to Under Armour to Victoria’s Secret, brands are turning their attention to sports bras.

Photo: Jenny White/Brittany Holloway-Brown

But researchers are still a long way from understanding exactly how breasts move during exercise. Standing in the way of designing the best sports bra possible is millennia of stigma, powerful marketing forces, and good old-fashioned physics.

Breasts have no muscle. They sit on top of the pectoral muscles, but breasts themselves are all fat and glands and connective tissue. They’re held to the chest by something called Cooper’s ligaments, though those ligaments aren’t designed to reduce movement. As one study puts it, “the skin appears to provide most of the support for the breast in regards to limiting breast movement.”

That is to say that there is nothing biological working to stop breasts from moving. Without any such built-in support, as any person with breasts can attest, they bounce up and down freely, which can cause a fair bit of discomfort. When surveyed, between 40 and 60 percent of women report breast pain associated with physical activity. That pain makes women less likely to exercise, and among those who do, hurts their performance.

Understanding the biomechanics of bouncing is key to understanding how to make it stop, but it’s a field that’s only recently gained traction. And since breast size, placement, and density are different for every woman, researchers need to look at a large sample to get a good idea of what’s going on.

Understanding the biomechanics of bouncing is key to understanding how to make it stop, but it’s a field that’s only recently gained traction.

Even two people with the same sized breasts might have different breast composition; put them in the same bra, and one might be in heaven while the other can barely breathe. “There are so many factors going on, it’s hard to pin down that it’s the bra,” says Jenny White, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth who studies breast motion.

White’s research aims to better understand how breasts move, and what that means for the people who have them. When volunteers come into her lab, she has them do a variety of physical activities in a variety of bras (and without one), and asks them to report how each activity and fit feels. She also uses a sophisticated motion capture system, placing reflective markers on the bra.

Recruiting for this kind of study can be hard, White says, but she came up with a clever strategy. In 2013, her team targeted female runners in the London Marathon: “At registration, we tried to accost as many of them as possible. We got about 1,300 people and we were able to understand that population.”

It’s one thing to be able to see a woman run in a bra in a lab. It’s another to see what they experience after 26.2 miles. Over the course of a marathon, White says, “you might start seeing changes in the patterns of their running. You’re probably going to see a decrease in stride levels. You’re just not performing as well as you could.”

On the other side of the world, at the University of Wollongong in Australia, Julie Steele does similar research. Women who sign up for Steele’s studies come in and are all given the same standard issue, commercially-available bra. This lets the team compare how women fit themselves, how they’re fitted by experts, and how they fill out and move in the control bra.

Photo: Victoria’s Secret/Brittany Holloway-Brown

They then go through a series of tests to figure out the mechanics. “We use 3D scanning, ultrasounds, and devices that measure the skin to really better understand the structure of the breasts of these women,” says Steele. “We really need to better understand how that goes together to make the breasts move.”

Both Steele and White say there’s a constant battle going on between controlling the bounce and making bras comfortable. You could squash the breasts tightly against the body, but that makes it hard to breathe. The most common complaint, in the long list of ways in which sports bras are painful, is that the straps are too tight, sometimes even causing them to break.

It’s worth noting that wearing the wrong sports bra isn’t just a matter of discomfort or annoyance. Studies have shown that breast discomfort is a leading reason women stop participating in sports. And in extreme cases, an ill-fitting bra can actually do nerve damage. Bra straps generally cross over the brachial plexus, the nerve bundle that sends impulses to and from the arm. Women who wear bras with too-tight straps can damage that bundle, causing pain and numbness.

Another thing Steele and White worry about is that women aren’t wearing the right sized bra. A full 75 percent of the marathon runners White talked to had some kind of bra problem during training. “I think we need to scrap the whole bra system and start again from a sizing system,” Steele says. Bra sizing is confusing, imprecise, and variable. This isn’t just a sports bra problem, either; some surveys say that literally 100 percent of women are wearing the wrong sized bra.

A full 75 percent of the marathon runners White talked to had some kind of bra problem during training.

White says that the methods she, Steele, and their peers use to study breast movement might soon change dramatically. “We’re at this crossover period,” she says. White thinks that in the near future, they’ll be using something called inertial sensors — tiny sensors that can be placed directly on the breast itself to gather GPS and acceleration data.

There are a few benefits to this new method. First, the sensors that attach to the breast directly rather than to the sports bra can tell researchers much more information about what the breast is doing underneath the bra. “So it means we completely get rid of any discrepancy between what the breast is doing and what the bra is doing,” she says. In other words, if the bra is too big, or has padding or anything else that might make it move differently from how the breast itself is moving, the researchers will be able to detect that.

Second, these sensors don’t require the camera setup that White’s markers do, which means researchers could use them out in the field and see how breasts move in their natural environments, like during a soccer game or in a road race.

The sensor technology isn’t quite there yet, but White says that it’s coming: “It’s been a slow development, they haven’t been small enough to place on the breast. But they’re getting that small, so we’ve got a provisional system.”

Today, there are a lot more choices than the original Jogbra jock strap design. In fact, as anybody who has gone shopping for a sports bra recently can attest, there is an overwhelming number of choices, from strappy yoga designs to padded cups to the classic racerback. But the choices women face come down to two main categories: compression bras and encapsulation bras.

“Once you go above a certain size, you start coming out everywhere anyway.”

Compression bras are the bras most people associate with sports bras — a single panel of fabric that hugs the breasts into the chest. The idea here is that if you can compress the breasts against the body, pulling them so they’re closer to your center of gravity, they’ll bounce less. Which is true, as long as the breasts in question aren’t too large.

Encapsulation bras treat each breast individually, more like a regular bra. While compression bras work perfectly well for women who fall into the A- and B-cup range, larger breasted women need more support. Some studies suggest that encapsulation bras can provide that, but not everyone is in agreement. In 2009, White found that for D-cup women, the difference in breast displacement between a compression bra and an encapsulation bra was insignificant.

“Once you go above a certain size, you start coming out everywhere anyway,” White explains. She also notes that compression bras are far more common in the United States than elsewhere in the world. For very large breasted women, some bras combine the two strategies, using individual cups for each breast with an outer compression layer on top.

In October of last year, Nike announced a new line of athletic gear for women, including sports bras, that it hoped would bring in $2 billion annually by 2017. This year, Under Armour announced its plans to reach $7.5 billion in sales, and as part of that growth, executives have pointed to its growing sports bra line.

Photo: Jenny White/Brittany Holloway-Brown

It’s not just athletic brands getting in on the action either; designers of all stripes are dipping their toes into the athletic market. Designer Mara Hoffman just released an activewear line that includes colorful sports bras. Rebecca Minkoff and Tory Burch recently did the same. There’s even a startup trying to disrupt the sports bra industry.

While there are suddenly a ton of options out there for women, not all of them are good. “There is no piece of clothing that is more difficult to design well than a sports bra,” says LaJean Lawson, a breast researcher and consultant for Champion Athletics. “There are so many different parameters. It’s the most hooked into cultural stereotypes. You have to think about sweat, support, chafing, straps, slippage, and then looking cute. That’s a really long list of conflicting design requirements.”

Lawson has been studying breasts, their movement, and the bras that contain them for Champion since 1984, when she tested the original Jogbra. In 1987, she evaluated the seven sports bras Champion had on offer using a 16mm film camera. Today, she employs the same methods that White’s lab does, using complex camera tracking to test hundreds of bras both from Champion and other companies. “I just ordered $1,000 worth of Victoria’s Secret sports bras to test in the lab,” Lawson says, “and they called me and asked, ‘Who are you, and why are you buying all these bras?'”

White’s team works directly with brands who want to evaluate their bras using her methods. She runs breast science workshops a few times a year, where representatives get an introductory crash course and learn ways bras can be designed to help reduce pain. From there, White offers her lab’s services to companies who want to come in and test their designs.

“There is no piece of clothing that is more difficult to design well than a sports bra. It’s the most hooked into cultural stereotypes.”

One of the brands that has taken White up on the offer is Shock Absorber, a UK sports bra company that prides itself on its scientifically-supported designs. “Since this original research was carried out, Shock Absorber has tested all new styles at the University of Portsmouth to measure their reduction in breast movement,” its site states.

White wouldn’t share the names of other brands she’s worked with, but Kelly Cortina, vice president of women’s apparel at Under Armour, disclosed that her team has used the Portsmouth lab. There, Cortina says, “we tested on women of all different sizes to ensure that the bra is minimizing breast movement and managing moisture efficiently.” White’s lab offers everything from a basic bra test to a “gold-level” setup where the company gets heavily involved in the fundamental research the team is doing.

In her ideal world, White would work with brands from the very beginning of their design phase, so they can test out many iterations of their styles. But that’s not how it usually happens: “Unfortunately many companies have gone through the whole process of design and they just want to know how good it is.”

Lawson, on the other hand, gets to work on Champion’s designs from the start. Along with a team of engineers, Lawson advises on seam placement, strap design, how to change contours, which parts will rub, and more.

White and Lawson keep a close eye on the trends in sports bras, and they have both seen a recent rise in bras with padding. “Last spring, when I did my last project, I had 12 bras to test,” Lawson says. “Four were Champion, eight were competitors, and 10 out of those 12 had some kind of padding in them.” White also saw more bras featuring lots of straps, and ones that look more like everyday bras: “I’ve noticed more sports bra that we’re testing having underwire.”

Here is where those athleisure offerings from brands like Mara Hoffman and Tory Burch are having an impact. “It’s had a noticeable influence on what women want in their sports bra,” Lawson says. “There have never been more products out on the market from non-athletic brands that don’t have the structure and the design to meet women’s needs when she’s out kicking it hard on the road.” Lawson adds that when she tests those bras on women in the lab, their flaws quickly become apparent. “When I can’t get a woman to take an $80 sports bra home for free, I mean, that’s a bad sign.”

Photo: Nike/Brittany Holloway-Brown

But this is the really tricky part: how good a sports bra is depends on what you’re measuring. For White, the quality of a bra has everything to do with the comfort of the user wearing it. But for brands, that’s not the only consideration.

Sports bras aren’t just a piece of sports equipment. They’re not like a bat or a baseball mitt or shin guards — designed, for the most part, for maximum functionality. They’re cultural objects, they’re fashion objects, and as such they’re laden with all kinds of baggage about how a woman is supposed to look. “There’s so much more to a sports bra than just a bra,” says Jaime Schultz, a sociologist who studies women and sports.

Just look at the way sports bras are advertised. The very first ad for the Jogbra boasted that its “unique design holds breasts close to the body.” Twenty years later, the company changed its tune. Suddenly, holding breasts close to the body, literally the entire purpose of the Jogbra, was a no-no. “Only abs should be flat,” a new ad read in 1996. “Now, a sports bra that respects and defines your natural shape.”

Today, Victoria’s Secret is continuing the war against compressed breasts. They call this “the uniboob.” Victoria’s Secret chief executive officer Sharen Jester Turney announced last year that the war against the uniboob was in full force: “We wanted to solve the uniboob problem, where your sports bra makes you look straight across — no one likes that. This bra is just as much about performance and function as the look.”

“One of my testers is an aspiring Olympic marathoner, she’s a 32C and she’s like, ‘I don’t want to be flat.'”

Well guess what, sometimes the uniboob is in fact the best way to reduce breast motion and pain. But women are constantly being told that even their sports bra should be sexy. Styles with spaghetti straps and low V’s and padded cups win out over wide straps and good support. “Women feel like they have to present themselves in the best possible breasted way that will appeal sexually,” says Schultz.

Under Armour’s Cortina echoed some of those sentiments in an email. “Women want to feel good and look good,” she wrote. “Gone are the days of sacrificing style for fit or comfort. She expects and DESERVES a bra (no matter the cup size) to fit, perform, and be on trend. Many bras offer one but not the others. She wants it all and she can have it all!”

Lawson says that she hears from lots of women that they want padding, and while she herself is not a proponent of enhanced sports bras, she’s also quick to say she doesn’t want to dismiss other women’s desires: “One of my testers is an aspiring Olympic marathoner, she’s a 32C and she’s like, ‘I don’t want to be flat.’ That shocked me, but that’s one of those things that has turned my ideas on their ear in the last few years.”

This is a perfect example of the “be everything at once” dilemma women face. A bra can’t just be a good bra, it also has to be fashionable and womanly. It has to hold the girls nicely, without diminishing their size and shape. And when forced to chose between those two things, bra manufacturers almost invariably chose look over function.

When asked about the future of sports bras, Lawson talked more about materials than overall design. She expects we’ll see materials “that can respond to breast impact so the control is local rather than being on the shoulder, materials that are better at responding to body temperatures and heat rates.” The compression and encapsulation styles, she says, are serviceable enough. While they could certainly use improvements in form, the foundational system of sports bras probably won’t change much any time soon.

And therein lies the problem. Lawson or White or any bra designer could, tomorrow, invent the world’s best sports bra. Something comfortable and supportive and soft and easy to put on and take off. Something that wicks away sweat while providing coverage. Something that doesn’t pinch the shoulders or squeeze the rib cage. But if that sports bra isn’t cute, it wouldn’t matter. “I think the biggest problem is that a lot of it isn’t based on science,” says Steele. “It’s based on fashion and look. And that’s what sells.”

Editor: Julia Rubin
Photo illustrations by Brittany Holloway-Brown

Why the ‘Kitchen of the Future’ Always Fails Us

2019-03-06T05:34:36-05:00

Imagine the home of the future. It probably has a lot of glass. Maybe a robot butler or two. The living room is full of egg-shaped furniture, the family owns a drone, the television is part of the wall, the thermostat calibrates the temperature of each room based on the body temperature of its occupants, using data gathered from their subdermal implants.

Around the corner, in the kitchen, our lovely future wife is making dinner. She always seems to be making dinner. Because no matter how far in the future we imagine, in the kitchen, it is always the 1950’s, it is always dinnertime, and it is always the wife’s job to make it. Today’s homes of the future are full of incredible ideas and gizmos, but while designers seems happy to extrapolate far beyond what we can do today when it comes to battery life or touch screens, they can’t seem to wrap their minds around any changes happening = culturally. In a future kitchen full of incredible technology, why can we still not imagine anything more interesting than a woman making dinner alone?

Read the rest of this post on Eater. »

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.