Sketchbook
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Concept: The Food Guide
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1 min read
At the most expensive and sophisticated restaurants, the service tends to be the same as in a diner, just more refined and thorough. But it could be quantitatively different. Elite restaurants feature exotic ingredients and preparation that require an experienced fork and palette to appreciate, expertise many of us don’t possess and for which the…
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Concept: Ambient Light-Powered Smoke Alarm
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1 min read
Smoke alarms have saved thousands of lives in the United States since their introduction and widespread use during the past 2 decades. The good news is that more than 90% of homes in the United States now have at least 1 smoke alarm.1 The bad news is that a substantial proportion of those smoke alarms…
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Imagining the Aeron bed
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2 min read
Ulrike and I had a brief discussion about the thermal properties of our Tempur-Pedic mattress today (summary: great overall, but it seems somehow hotter in the summer than other mattresses) and I said for hot climates it’d be nice to have an Aeron bed. It would have a supporting mesh material that would let air…
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Backslider continued
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1 min read
Brett volleys with an expansion of my backslider idea for enhancing the browser back button. Browsing recently seen pages is very frequent behavior, so this is important functionality to improve.
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Backslider
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1 min read
Riffing with Brett about how richer interaction could be used for navigation, I thought it’d be nice to have browser back button functionality that’s as fast as scrolling. Imagine you have a little slider in (for example) the upper left of the window, and sliding the handle horizontally scrolled by the pages in your history.…
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Dreyfuss Mobile Phone
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2 min read
You know what would be great? If someone created a mobile phone in the shape of Henry Dreyfuss’s classic 500 Series handset (not the whole phone, just the handset)… Yes, it’s rather large, but this could be used to our advantage. The space between the receiver and transmitter could hold a PDA… Riffing with Liz…
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Marsupial Mouse
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2 min read
Imagine this scene: a 40-something art director talks through a design review session in a conference room in front of her colleagues. At one point she reaches over to the Dell laptop which serves as the conference room computer to bring up a website. The laptop has not one but two pointing devices built in,…
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Your email has been sent.
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1 min read
…and then what? What do you give them after they click Send? None of the usual approaches satisfy me. I want to give that person who just took the time to send us email a big smooch, or some sort of instant gratification, a coupon for free ice cream, a free report, something of beauty…
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Extra-Company Resource Management
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1 min read
Walking down 87th St this morning I passed some construction workers hanging out on the sidewalk, as if they’re waiting for someone to pick them up for a job. This makes me think about new media workers…is there a reason we haven’t moved to a project-based model of employment like the movie industry uses, employing…
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A Blog Reader
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2 min read
A user experience idea, part of the LazyWeb PositioningBlogReader is a useful, everyday tool for many people. While other content tracking, reading, or ranking applications came and went, BlogReader has consistently provided the content readers wanted in an easy and flexible way, and in doing so has become an ingrained part of many people’s everyday…
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Map Navigation I’d Like to See
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1 min read
Redesigning Yahoo Maps a bit.