Tag Archives: design

The corner staircase

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I’ve always had this vision of building my own house. I have no experience with architecture, I struggle to build IKEA furniture, and lack basic handyman skills… but I’ve always wanted to design my own dream home. One feature I envision is a staircase in an all-glass corner of the house. It’s kind of a double spiral staircase, and it is designed such that both at the top and the bottom, you walk towards the corner to go both up and down the stairs, and they turn at the halfway point. At the top, you just walk towards the corner and then have a choice of turning either to the left or right. Essentially, you go down about 5 or six steps to a landing where the spiral splits both ways, going away from the corner and along the side walls.

At the bottom of the steps, the first 2 steps create a half circle or crescent, going completely across the corner. Then the stairs spiral left or right with a railing that is only about 6 inches above and behind the second step at the center, and then spirals up with the steps to railing hight by the 4th or 5th step. This creates an empty space on the inside of the spiral, behind the first 2 steps. In this space, underneath the stairs that are coming  down from the floor above, there is a waterfall and then a fish pond in the void behind the spirals.

One more feature is that the wall behind the waterfall has 2 possible positions, one is just less than 90º and the other is just a bit more than 90º. This allows the waterfall to either be a true falls, with water splashing as it lands in the pond, or it can be subtle with water silently sliding down the wall into the pond. So, it’s a wonderful, natural background noise when you want it, but also a subtle trickle when you’d like quiet.

I’ve tried drawing it, but can’t seem to get it right. The AI image I created here is a start of the idea, although not completely what I envision. I’ve tried many times to tweak this image, or use other tools, but I lack the descriptive skills to really get what I want. Still, this would be one feature I’d love to have if I was ever given the chance to design my own house.

Enshitification

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I asked Copilot to search my blog for, “posts where technology improves while systems (work, economy, institutions, structures) get worse.”

It shared the following summary:

 

The reason I asked for this is because I wanted to look back on posts that reminded me of this skit out of Norway. It is, as the Threads post suggests, “utterly brilliant”!

You can find the video and more information on the website at the end of the video.

We aren’t imagining this, things are getting intentionally worse. On social media we are not the customer, we are the product sold to advertisers. And even when we are the customer, we don’t buy anything outright anymore, no, we get locked into subscriptions.

Copilot didn’t find the one post I was looking for, but I found it to share here:

Sometime technology s(UX)

I’ll end here with a couple paragraphs from that post, no need to try writing something I already said,

“I want to use my credit card at a gas station, not only must I put in my pin, I need to say how much I want to spend as a maximum. Every instant teller I go to asks me what language I want to work in… how hard would it be for the machine to know my preference after asking once? And as for autocorrect… it’s getting worse, not better.

I love my tech, but it seems to me that technology is all about adding features, and not about user experience (UX). The user is forgotten as new bells and whistles are added. Or things are so locked down that I need Face ID, a confirmation text, and coming soon, a DNA scan. Between new features and new security measures, there seems little time spent thinking about what the experience is for the end user.”

Crappy user experience

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A bit of a rant here. I’m doing some medical expense claiming and my provider has an App that is not designed with the end user in mind. First I have to go to 3 different pages to make a claim. Then after all the claim details are entered, I have to scroll down on a confirmation page that has my address on individual lines that take up to much screen real-estate that the ‘Consent and Declaration’ is hidden under the ‘Submit’ button. So you end up hitting the Submit button only then to learn that you need to scroll down and click the consent, which opens up in another page.

Also, I use my laptop and phone for much of the day and don’t need reading glasses, but my pharmacy prints the details I need to make the above claim in tiny, hard to read font. This is so unnecessary. It’s already really confusing trying to locate all the information, which is spread out into 3 different sections of the prescription receipt, does it also need to be in microscopic font? This is the only thing I’ve had to put reading glasses on to see in the last few months.

I get tired of user interfaces that are designed for the product and not the user. The insurance company probably doesn’t want to claims to be easy to do, they’d rather you had to go through a more challenging process to make a claim. The pharmacy changed their format so that the prescription receipt gets printed on a small sticker, and I’m sure cost saving was more important to them than providing a readable receipt for their aging customers. And this kind of behaviour may or may not be intentional, but it is ignorant of the end user’s experience. I’ve complained before about inconsistencies in remote controls, apps that want your attention at the cost of your convenience, and how it feels like we are decades behind where we should be when doing things like setting up a new printer. I would say that over 95% of the things I rant about are related to products and services providing crappy user experiences.

How hard would it be to have the customer in mind as a priority, rather than an afterthought?

Jury summons

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I was due to go to court this morning for a jury summons. Last night I checked my personal email before bed to learn that it was canceled. It’s a bit of a relief for me because this is not a great time to miss work and the summons was for a 20 day criminal trial.

Like voting, I think that being summoned for jury duty is a civil duty. To participate in a free and just society, you need to support the political and judicial systems that make that society work. But I can’t imagine having to leave a job for 20 or more working days.

Perhaps there should be incentives for retired people to be jurors? I don’t know how you would design this to be fair, but I will say that I’d be much more willing to do my civic duty as a juror when I don’t have to worry about missing work. More than fixing that, I wonder if there isn’t a way to make the whole process shorter? What parts of a case in a law court could use a revamp in design and process so courts cases are less drawn out and more to the point? I honestly have no idea, but I think this is a question that’s worth looking into.

Design, purpose, and practice

I was having a coffee with a friend just outside of a Starbucks on a beautiful, sunny morning, when we witnessed a dog owner tie his dog to this post and head into the coffee shop..

“ATTENTION
PET OWNERS
DO NOT LEAVE PETS UNATTENDED”

A few things occurred to me:

  1. The sign (obviously) isn’t going to stop the behavior.
  2. The sign is at the wrong height… it should probably be at the height that the person would tie the dog to the post. (Which would also make tying the dog there more difficult as well as being more likely to be read.)
  3. The sign doesn’t solve the problem. Dogs can’t go into the store, and a pet owner will still leave their dog tied somewhere, so they can quickly grab a coffee.

I don’t know what the solution is? Even if the post wasn’t there, the pet owner could use the tree that’s just a few feet away… but I think it’s funny that the very post with the sign is the most convenient place for dog owners to leave their unattended pet.

I understand that this has potential to cause issues, with strangers (potentially kids) petting the dog, or other dogs passing by with their owners taking issue with the tied up dog. But is there something else that can be done? Is there a way to design a store line up that is dog friendly? Is there a way a dog owner could be queued in a line from outside the store? Could there be a location the tied up and unattached dog is less likely to be an issue?

The purpose of the dog owner is to respect the rules that dogs don’t come into the coffee shop, and so they leave the dog outside momentarily while they grab a coffee. The purpose of the sign is to stop unattended dogs from being a safety issue. This is a common practice with dog owners, and I struggle to think of a time that I’ve seen an unattended dog cause an issue.

So is this just an etiquette thing where owners of dogs that shouldn’t be left alone simply shouldn’t do so, and just forgo the sign? Do we need to have a sign to prevent stupidity? Or is this actually an important enough issue to warrant a sign? If so, what solutions can we come up with?

PS. I think it’s worth mentioning that I don’t own a dog.

Public spaces

How would you reimagine building a public space for the future? How can parks not just be green outdoor spaces but gathering spaces? How can a library be about more than a collection of books? How can we make our cities more walkable? How can public schools be more innovative, less industrial?

I think back to my holiday in Barcelona, Spain, and remember how outdoor spaces felt like an extension to our AirBNB. The cafes, wide sidewalks, and public squares felt like a continuation of the living room.

As we design a future infused with AI technologies, how are we thinking about the livability of our cities and neighbourhoods? How are we thinking about public, social spaces? Our focus seems to be on technology, and how it will make work and life easier… wouldn’t that present us with an opportunity for more free time? More opportunities to enjoy our communities? How can we improve our public spaces so that we enjoy that ‘extra’ time in our communities?

How would you improve our public spaces?

Little inventions

Imagine driving down a rainy highway without windshield wipers. Dealing with a painful hang nail without nail clippers. Always having to put on shoes with buckles rather than laces. Or even phones without touch screens.

I love seeing new, inventive products come out, like a tooth brush that brushes all your teeth simultaneously in 20 seconds. Everyone needs to brush their teeth. Almost no one does it extremely well or for long enough. Along comes this little invention to save time and be more effective.

Now I’m not jumping out to buy one. I’m not convinced this isn’t a little gimmick that won’t really do what it promises. But I just love seeing inventions like this come out. I like seeing how people solve little problems we didn’t know we had. Or problems everyone have and think there is no solution to.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, but I think luxury is too. Humans are constantly finding ways to make life easier, and more enjoyable… and creative ideas abounds.

What’s a little invention you don’t necessarily need, but absolutely love?

Positively Subversive Leadership

A colleague in my district was recently complaining that when she went to her staff to see what their needs were, they said they needed new desks. These are an equipment update that:

  1. Will require a fair percentage of the school’s expendable budget.
  2. Won’t help the school progress or move forward with their practice.

As such, my colleague was disappointed that this is what she’d be spending so much of her budget on.

I suggested that she only purchase tables for two students and not individual desks. This meets the need of replacing old desks but invites, if not almost forces, a different way of running a classroom. Students must be in pairs or fours, the tables fold to get out of the way, and they are usually on wheels which invites them being moved regularly.

Instead of randomly replacing desks in different classrooms, she could put all the new desks in one classroom, and distribute the still good desks in that room to where they are needed. Who gets the new double desks? The teacher that wants to have them. If there is more than one, she can have discussions about how the teachers will use them to help her decide.

Transitioning to 2-student tables provides so many opportunities for collaboration, and a teacher excited about using them will change their practice even if they already grouped students together often. This takes a school need and turns it into an opportunity. If someone else is asking for those same tables and the budget isn’t there for them, that invites a conversation about how single desks can be used together to achieve the same goals.

It’s not fun having to use a lot of your budget to replace old items, but this can provide a chance to upgrade in a way that invites a different approach. This is a way to take an expense and turn it into an opportunity.

Secret Origin of the Enneagram

The Enneagram.

A shape that has been around for hundreds of years. It has esoteric significance and it has been used as a model for personality types for years.

But something is missing… and that’s the origin of this unique shape.

Not anymore. Joe Truss discovered, or rather uncovered, the following unique origin story of the Enneagram. Perhaps the Sufis of the past knew, but this knowledge was lost: The 2-Dimensional Enneagram has 3-Dimensional roots. Enjoy this short video to learn more: Secret Origins of the Enneagram.

“The Enneagram is a 3-Dimensional structure which manifests through the vertices of the icosahedron.” ~ Joseph Truss

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And if you think this is interesting, Joe has also uncovered the tetrahedral structure of our universe… if you know a physicist who can challenge these ideas, both Joe and I invite them to break this theory apart: We Live in a Tetraverse.

Please share with people whom you think might be interested.
Thank you.

The Nvidia omniverse

The future is here. In this quick video Nvideo CEO Breaks Down Omniverse, Jensen Huang discusses a virtual space where robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) practice and rehearse their actions in a virtual space before trying things out in the real world. Specifically, he discusses car manufacturing and trying out designs of both machines and factories before physically building them, reducing rebuilding and redesigning time.

This is a game changer in the design of not just systems but in building physical things. The design phase of new products just got a steroids boost, and the world we know is no longer the world we live in.

We are now in an era of AI assisted design and manufacturing that is going to explode with amazing new products. Robots using AI in a virtual omniverse, trying out new creative ways to build new items faster, and more efficiently. Robots building robots that are tested in a virtual world, tweaked by AI, and retested virtually, tweaking the design of the very robots that will be building the new robots. Let that last sentence sink in… robots and AI redesigning other robots and AI… machines building and designing machines.

But that in itself isn’t the steroid boost. The real power comes from practicing everything first in this virtual omniverse world. Trying out the physics and dynamics of the new tools in an environment where they can be tested thousands and even millions of times before actually being built. This is where the learning is accelerated, and where things will move so much faster than we’ve ever seen before.

Products used to takes years of development to be built, but now a lot of that time is going to happen virtually… and with iterations not happening sequentially but simultaneously. So years of development and production design happen in moments rather than years. With the omniverse we are going to see an acceleration of design and production that will make the next few years unrecognizable.

It makes me wonder what amazing new products await us in the next 5-10 years?