I was thinking about sticking to a theme this week,
presenting four pieces that all present designs for which I have serious
questions.
Take for example the web-enabled smart toothbrush that uses
an accelerometer to examine your brushing skills and social pressure to get you
to brush in the correct schedule. Ummmm,
not so much.
I also question the benefits of this new kind of crosswalk
design that blends the sidewalk into the street. The visual attention requirements of this
design make me really afraid that it will cause a lot of confused pedestrians
to walk right in front of a car.
Then there are also the infamous epic fails of collaborativefiltering algorithms. These are the ones
that use what your friends like or two products that are often purchased
together to make recommendations. These
suffer from a lot of challenges but just as often give me a chuckle about some
of the dumber mistakes.
But I broke the theme with my post on First Responder Gloves. This is a good improvement, at least from the
article I cited. It can save lives for
first responders to have better gloves – their own lives and the lives of the people
they are treating. Perhaps this makes up
for all of the questionable designs from the other posts.