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There are certain social media rules we can all agree on: Ghosting a conversation is impolite, and replying k to a text is the equivalent of a backhand slap (violent, wrong, and rude). But what about the rest of the rules? When can we really remind someone of our old Venmo request? What happens when someone tries to flirt with you on LinkedIn? Fortunately, terminally online writers Delia Cai and Steffi Cao are here to answer all your digital quandaries, big or small. Welcome to Fast Companys new advice column, Posting Playbook. This week, Steffi opines on what you should do when you dont want to be tagged in the group photo. How should I tell my friend I look bad in the group photo and want them to untag me? So youre looking through the group iCloud after a night out, where your Type A friend has uploaded all the photos. You swipe through and immediately cringe. Oh no! This was not the sultry, chic, carefree pictures you thought you took together. Your hair is messy, youre not at your optimal photo-taking angle, your skin isnt at its best, you can see your undereye circles, your cheeks are puffy from last nights ramen, your smile looks kind ofweird. And then, Defcon 10: Someone posts that group photo on their public Instagram feed. And theyve tagged you. Que horror! What you should do is just tell your friend you want to be untagged. Yes, Im all for learning to be okay with the different ways your face looks, and the importance of body neutrality, but if its going to discomfit you to the point of distraction, just tell them. Thats your friend after all, right? In all likelihood, theyll tell you that youre beautiful and perfect (you are) and respect the untag. No one is responsible for your own self-perception, but were all going through the same mental obstacle course of being constantly exposed to technology-influenced ideals of beauty, so we can at least be polite about it. Theres been a lot of coverage about how we were never meant to see ourselves this much, and it still rings true. Social media has lured us into believing our faces are insufficient under the microscope of the infinite scroll. By the metrics of the wider celebrity and influencer landscape, everyone else seems to have glass skin, a defined jawline, a cinched waist, shoulders that could be drawn in perpendicular linesso why dont we? Not to mention, everyone can be made into content by any phone at any time, making us more conscious than ever of how we look from every angle. While content used to be a window into life, saved for special occasions or those with the technological access and capability, now, every moment of life is a frame for content. Meals, daily routines, nights out, routines at home. Theres an emphasis to make every aspect perfectly aspirational. We dont have to accept it, but in the meantime, we need to find ways to manage it while understanding that its not the healthiest choice for our lives. Overall, my stance is that the proper etiquette is to let everyone select their favorite photos before running to post them online. Everyones relationship with their own bodies is so personal, the least we can do as people going through the same thing is to respect an Instagram request when it comes up. How should I introduce myself in a group chat? At this point, we have seen every kind of group chat introduction under the sun, ranging from hiiii this is sarah so excited to be here~ to Victoria. It can be daunting to introduce yourself, especially in a big group, but moreover, its more important to start standardizing it all. My take is that we should all start introducing ourselves in group chats with a simple first name-last name text, simply for the organizational purpose of logging contacts into everyones phones. There are no nicknames in my phone, no emojis for loved ones. Everyone is saved by their government name. Toss a hi! in if you want, but I need it to be short and informative. Cut the nonsense. I dont need to know that you are excited to be in the group chatwe all are, and Im looking forward to hanging out with you. The information I need is an ID. Especially if youre introducing yourself via text outside a group chat, I also encourage that you add context as to how you both know each other. Everyone is overstimulated, and its nice to keep that reminder in. I have 322 unread text messages from a lot of unsaved numbers because I cant figure out who emilyyyyy :3 is. Did I meet emilyyyyy at a work event? At a bar? Through a mutual friends birthday party? Whats wrong with: Hi! Its Steffi Cao, glad I ran into you at the bookshop. Let me know when youre free for coffee! I dont care that it doesnt reflect my loud and abrasive personality! Im here to make our phone storage easier. Bring back organization! I will learn about your cute and dazzling personality IRL!
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E-Commerce
Before air-conditioning existed, staying cool during the summer months in the southern United States was a foreign skill for early European colonists. But enslaved Africans, hailing from similar warm climates, had developed, over centuries, architectural strategies for combating sweltering summer conditions. It was from these early enslaved builders that the most quintessential architectural feature of homes in the United States emerged: the porch. Porches, verandas, porticoes, and other types of outdoor coverings connected to a building have existed in various forms across the globe for centuries. However, what we think of as an American style of porch, first associated with homes in the southern United States, originally evolved from the dwellings of enslaved people. Anthropologist James Deetz explains that the early homes of colonists did not have porches and that the closest thing to porches were small, enclosed vestibules that were similar to mudrooms. He states, Porches are probably of African origin. . . . We have seen that porches have been found on slave cabins excavated at Kingsmill [Plantation in Virginia], dating to the third quarter of the eighteenth century. This is the earliest evidence that we have for porches to date. [Illustration: Johnalynn Holland/courtesy Chronicle Books] At around the same time that the porches at Kingsmill Plantation were built, shotgun homes emerged in New Orleans. A result of the major influx of Haitian free people of color who came to the United States in the early 1800s, shortly after the Haitian revolution, the shotgun home is an adaptation of West African residential architecture and almost always has a front porch. Shotgun homes are narrow houses, typically no more than twelve feet wide, in which one room leads to the next with no hallway between. Shotgun homes and their attached porches spread throughout the South from the 1860s through the 1920s. With the advent of industrialized lumber at the end of the nineteenth century, and thanks to the shotguns small footprint and ease of construction, this housing style became popular in poor, working-class, and middle-class communities, both Black and white. Engineering professor John H. Lienhard writes: When the cost of wood fell during the late 1800s, the shotgun house did indeed become the best way the poor could keep a roof over their heads. But, by then, shotgun houses had added a new element to the American architectural vocabulary. You see, shotgun houses gave us the southern porch. We didnt previously have porches like that in America. Like the shotgun house itself, southern porches are now all over America. Anthropologist John Michael Vlach writes of the front porchs hidden legacy: The impact of African architectural concepts has ironically been disguised because their influence has been so widespread; they have been invisible because they are so obvious. This unfortunate circumstance is demonstrated by the history of that common extension of the housethe front porch. [Illustration: Johnalynn Holland/courtesy Chronicle Books] Porches werent the only architectural innovation that enslaved people were instrumental in creating. Tabby, a unique building material used throughout the southeastern coastal region, is made from crushed oyster shells, sand, water, and ash. This cement-like substance has origins in Africa, Mesoamerica, and the Iberian coast, though historians debate where it was first used. Like most things in America, credit lies in the mixture of cultures and ideas among Indigenous, African, and European people. In many cases, innovations that are similar to each other have evolved independently all over the world, as different people have solved the same problems in similar ways. Scholars of material culture state: The oyster shells used to make the tabby were mined from shell mounds created by native peoples thousands of years before European arrival in the New World. By the early eighteenth century, tabby was used both in Spanish Florida and in West Africa. It is unclear whether tabbys origins lie in the coastal southeast or whether the technique was brought from West Africa through the slave trade. Some of the oldest original tabby structures are found among the dwellings of enslaved people at Kingsley Plantation in Jacksonville, Florida. Those enslaved at Kingsley worked under a task system, common in Spanish Florida. While still confined to the brutal boundaries of slavery, enslaved people under this system were afforded some measure of independent time to grow their own food, hunt, fish, socialize, and pursue crafts. Twenty-five of the original thirty-two tabby cabins where the enslaved lived at Kingsley Plantation still remain. Built in the 1820s, the cabins are arranged in a semicircle, facing a shared space where their inhabitants once socialized and cultivated gardens after completing their days tasks. The semicircular configuration of homes surrounding a communal center is a distinctly West African architectural characteristic; it is unique to Kingsley and not seen at any other plantation in the South. The prevailing explanation for this is that Anna Kingsley, the wife of Kingsley Plantation owner Zephaniah Kingsley, was from Senegal. Anna Kingsley was born Anta Mujigeen Ndiaye in Senegal and was purchased and enslaved by Zephaniah in Cuba in 1806, when she was only thirteen years old. Five years later, he emancipated her, and they entered into a public common-law marriage. Anna ran the affairs of Kingsley Plantation as well as Zephaniahs other estates and businesses. Anthropologist Antoinette T. Jackson writes of Annas remarkable and complicated life: At a young age, she learned to actualize her own power. She secured her freedom and the freedom of her children five years after her arrival in Florida when Zephaniah signed her emancipation papers in 1811, making her a legally recognized free woman of color. She went on to successfully run Zephaniahs varied businesses, manage his households, and enjoy land ownership and wealth herself. Annas story sheds light on the complicated social dynamics of the time and how they varied by region across the United States. Anna Kingsleys great-granddaughter say of her ancestors legacy: It is obviously a profoundly moving story. Its also a story which, in my view, has extraordinary complexity and contradictions. My great-grandmother was not only a slave, she owned slaves . . . so to feel that my great-grandmother had acquired the kind of wealth and the kind of prestige that would allow her to own slaves, I balance that with, She owned slaves! On the other hand, here was a woman of just extraordinary intelligence, ability. And, while I say that, I am conscious that she was probably in no sense uniquewe happen to have her story, but what we dont have, I am convinced, are the countless stories of women of no less intelligence, no less ability, whose stuff is simply lost. Anna Kingsleys Senegalese roots, coupled with the African architectural traditions present at the plantation, make this place a unique site of African American architectural history. The Kingsley story is also a testament to the incredible diversity of Black experiences during this period and the role that material culture can play in helping us understand how people lived and related to one another, oftentimes in more nuanced ways than we can imagine. Similarly, understanding the front porch as a distinctly Black architectural tradition challenges deep-seated assumptions about the diffusion of skill and knowledge in early America. Black people, whether enslaved or free, have long been portrayed as the recipients, not the bearers, of innovation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Excerpted from: A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects by Robell Awake, published by Chronicle Books 2025 [Photo: Chronicle Books] Footnotes: 1 John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), 13638. 2 James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Random House, 1977), 228. 3 Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten, 21929. 4 John H. Lienhard, Shotgun Homes and Porches, The Engines of Our Ingenuity, episode 820, University of Houston, accessed January 15, 2024, https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/820. 5 Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition, 13637. 6 Susan D. Morris, Tabby, New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified September 10, 2019, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/tabby/. 7 Pam James, Mary Mott, and Dawn Baker, Investigating a Tabby Slave Cabin, Project Archaeology: Investigating Shelter Series no. 12, accessed January 15, 2024, https://www.nps.gov/timu/learn/education/upload/KingsleyTeacher-Final-2.pdf. 8 Antoinette T. Jackson, Shattering Slave Life Portrayals: Uncovering Subjugated Knowledge in U.S. Plantation Sites in South Carolina and Florida, American Anthropologist 113, no. 3 (September 2011): 44862, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41407471. 9 Jackson, Shattering Slave Life Portrayals. 10 Quoted in Jackson, Shattering Slave Life Portrayals.
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E-Commerce
The world’s hunger for energy is growing at an unprecedented rate thanks to growing manufacturing and AI data centers. And our current electric generation capabilities just can’t cope with the demand. The situation is so dire that the International Energy Agency predicts a tripling of solar panel installations in ten years, a surge that will require a near doubling of the workforce. The U.S. solar industry is currently installing approximately 15,000 modules per hour which is laughable when industry experts are saying it needs to reach a staggering 50,000 modules per hour by 2035 to keep up with electricity demand. The reality is that humans cant build wind and solar farms fast enoughwhich is why utility and energy generation company AES has invented Maximo, an AI-powered robot designed to double the speed of solar farm deployment. Building a solar farm requires moving and installing modules weighing more than 60 pounds and measuring an unwieldy 6.5 x 3.25 feet each. It’s a tedious and potentially dangerous task. Maximo (nicknamed Max) is a medium-to-large, light gray robot that runs on two sets of tracks that is designed to make that operation a breeze. [Image: AES] Its boxy chassis with curved corners has a central platform that holds the multi-jointed robotic arm that lifts and places the solar panels. Small sensor modules dot the robot, mapping its surroundings so it knows where it is at all times as it reaches into the cradle on its back that holds the panels. Its a machine that looks like the future, thanks to the design work of industrial and brand design studio Fuseproject. Introduced last summer, AES says Maximo has become the first proven solar installation robot on the market. And while the company claims that Maximo isn’t intended to replace human workers, it doesn’t really need to. The solar industry faces an extreme shortage of skilled labor, so it cant tackle the sheer scale of the task at hand without using machines like this smart buggy with robotic eyes and arms. The genesis of Maximo began two years ago, as Yves Béhar, founder and principal designer of Fuseproject, told me during an interview. We had a really interesting initial discussion about increasing the capacity of solar power and making it more efficient, Béhar says. His experience with robotics and electric vehicles made the project particularly appealing to him. The combination of vehicle and robotics really at the service of accelerating the installation and the capacity of solar energy was something that I was very, very interested in. [Image: AES] Design principles The design process focused on several key principles. Scalability was paramount, as was seamless integration into existing workflows. Crucially, Maximo needed to be friendly in the field, a trustworthy friend to the human workers it would collaborate with. It’s not meant to replace workers, Béhar says. It’s really meant to complement. Its a tool to accelerate the transition to renewable energy, reducing the physical demands of having to lift panels [and accelerating the installation]. Fuseproject wanted to give Maximo a distinct identity aligned with AESs brand, while following very specific function requirements to maximize efficiency in the movements and manufacturing cost-effectiveness. The design needed to be scalable, too, as the vision was to have an army of bots covering deserts and plains with oceans of dark silicon panels. One of the most important criteria was to visually integrate all the different parts, Béhar explains, as Maximo is basically a tank platform that needs to carry a lot of eclectic components. It has two mechanical arms for installation, a cradle that holds all the panels that need to get installed, the power unit, and the AI module. Béhar tells me that these disparate elements needed to be tied under a single form. His team came up with a metallic sine wave-shaped ribbon that expresses what the product does, while also providing essential protection from the elements. This continuous form turned out to be the most visually significant element of the robot. Deise Yumi Asami, AES’s founder, says that Fuseproject did a phenomenal job on really getting into the fundamentals of what we wanted to convey with Maximo. The sine wave-like design incorporated into Maximo’s shape is a subtle nod to the alternating current of electricity. It’s really tied to our core existence of energy, she explains. Other design elements, such as the aqua color, references the AES logo. The specific shade was carefully chosen, Asami explains, as was the light gray color of the main body: White on the construction site can be very challenging, so Fuseproject helped them tune the color to a very light color of gray that would, you know, be enough to meet our kind of like this kind of clean futuristic visuals of Max. [Image: AES] How it works Maximo’s functionality is as important as its form. The ribbon sine wave, for example, also houses an integrated LED safety system that signals when human workers can approach Max. That was another core requirement from AES: The robot needed to be field-friendly, especially whenits volume and power is so unwieldy. Max was really developed to carry all the heavy lifting, but not only that, it had to really accelerate the pace in which we are installing solar panels, Asami tells me. Maximo moves on its own, recognizing the terrain around it. An operator simply engages a safe switch just in case something bad happens and then Maximo takes over the entire operation thanks to a combination of computer vision, artificial intelligence, and a behavioral tree the company developed with Amazon AWS. It knows where to go. And it will decide what’s the best path from path A to path B, Asami says. This allows Maximo to operate in the dynamic, uncontrolled environment of a construction site, a key difference from typical factory robots that are fixed in a single point and perform repetitive tasks always in the same place. This outdoor operation presented the most significant technological challenge, Asami says, requiring the development of robust AI and computer vision systems capable of handling glare and other visual issues that happen under different weather conditions and the changing position across different terrains. Safety was the third core requirement, not only through the integrated LED light system integrated in the ribbonwhich turns red, signaling to workers to maintain a safe distance when Max is working, even if its not movingbut with ultrasonic sensors that detect if anyone enters the operating zone, triggering an immediate stop. We have an abundance of redundancy, Asami points out. [Image: AES] The cradle that holds the solar panels was a unique design challenge. It seems like its the only module not perfectly integrated in the design. When I told Asami and Béhar, they acknowledged that there was no way around this, as it needed to adapt to different panel sizes. It needs to be continually accessible too, Asami says. And mechanically speaking, it adjusts to the different sizes of the solar modules. [Image: AES] The adaptability of every aspect of its design is key to Maximo’s autonomous nature. When it arrives to the solar farm, a worker carefully loads a rack of solar panels into the waiting cradle using a forklift. With its cargo secured, Maximo embarks on its journey along the solar farm, relying on its sophisticated computer vision and brain to chart the most efficient course and identify where each panel should go. Once it gets to the first solar array support structure, Maximo uses its arm to pick up a panel from the cradle, smoothly rotating it and carefully placing the panel onto the pre-installed mounting structure, called the torque tube, before securing it firmly in place. The mechanical installation is complete and then, the process repeats. Panel after panel, Maximo moves along the torque tube building the farm. The human operator only acts as a supervisor, ensuring everything runs smoothly, ready to intervene if needed. Once the cradle is empty, a worker reloads, and the cycle begins again. [Image: AES] Shiny skies ahead Maximo has already installed nearly 10 megawatts of solar and is projected to install 100 MW in 2025. From these first experiences, plans are going to be put on warp 9. AES claims it plans to deploy Maximo to help build up to 5 gigawatts of its solar project pipeline over the next three years. While AES isn’t disclosing specific production numbers, Asami says they are seriously ramping up production of the robot for their clients. Asamis ambition is to make Maximo a standard in solar farm construction. With the increasing labor shortages in the industry and the growing demand for solar installations, it seems that it is going to be a must have rather than a may need. The challenge, she noted, is not just about building more solar farms, but also about bringing them online quickly. The majority of the time that it’s spent on the site, it is spent on the installation of solar modules, she explains, making Maximo’s contribution to installation speed crucial. We do believe that Max will have a big impact, she says. And that’s why we see a lot of emerging competitors as well because everyone understands the need in the industry for something like Maximo. Heres to seeing more of these friendly beasts with their glowing aqua and red ribbons signaling the beginning of a new shiny solar world despite the dark stormy clouds now looming over us.
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E-Commerce
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