Friday, May 16, 2014

This week in EID



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.