Friday, November 07, 2014

This Week in EID – Episode 28



The articles on EID this week were pre-queued before the HFES conference because I had a feeling I would be pretty HF-brain dead.  The posts all refer to articles from the prior week, but with the benefit that I was able to put some thought into writing about them.  And I think the delay was worth the wait.  Four pretty good topics for the week. 

Activity trackers are such the rage these days I had to put a little kibosh on them.  As with most of my posts on self-delusion, the human condition is not robust enough to resist an excuse to feel superior. 

On the complete other side of the spectrum, work-lifebalance is something I am passionate about on the positive side.  But this post was not just about work and home.  The future of balance could include all kinds of lives – social media life, garage-band life, startup peer to peer company life, and many others.  I have friends who might resist a greater time commitment at work because of their knitting hobby or softball team.

The Thync is an interesting development in the brain stimulation field.  The technology still has a ways to go, but for now it can be used to zap your brain into greater stimulation.  With the right tuning, it might be able to target increased memory, increased creativity, or other specific skills.  But could it add to the digital divide if it is so expensive that it becomes a tool of the wealthy?

But the last post on black hat design is my favorite.  Not because I believe in black hat design but because it is about motivation, incentives, and many other topics that are going into the revolutionary gamification book I am writing. 

No comments: