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3 Reasons I Love “Undercover Boss”

You know how every once in a while you hear one of those statistics about how lazy and tv-obsessed Americans are and you think “how is that even possible?” Like the one that said 40% of Americans will sit and watch a television show they don’t like just because they don’t want to change the channel? Well I guess the disclaimer here should be that I think I might be one of those people. I’m not a tv-holic necessarily (I haven’t had cable since I was in college, and have lived long stretches of time with nothing but a laptop for entertainment without complaint), but when I do turn on…

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Robot Bathrooms (or Why I Hate Automatic Toilets )

Automatic flushing toilets were either not designed with women in mind, or not tested extensively on women before they were deployed in millions of bathrooms across America. Without getting into graphic detail, let’s just say that sometimes there are “other things” that women are trying to do when they are on the toilet besides simply relieving themselves, flushing, and going. Sometimes these “things” take a little bit of time and a little bit of agility. How that movement doesn’t get translated into a “she’s finished now, it’s time to flush” signal to the toilet is too technical for me, but that’s exactly what happens (sometimes multiple times in one “sitting”).…

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Is it Okay to be a Luddite?

When it comes to technology, I often find myself trying to live in two camps at once. On the one hand I am interested in new technology and new interfaces, and I want to be one of the first to try something and make some conjecture about how that new thing is or isn’t going to affect peoples’ lives or the technological landscape or what have you. On the other hand, it’s my job to try to empathize with people and imagine the contexts in which they experience the applications I have a hand in designing, and let’s face it, the majority of people out there are still running IE6.…

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Designing a New Currency

I ran across this post from SVA’s new IxD program last week, the headline reading Students Design Neighborhood Currencies. It sounded awesome, of course, so I clicked through only to find that my idea of what a group of IxD students would be asked to design and the actual assignment were way different. You see when I read “currency” I thought “exchange”, as in the trading of goods or services for some socially-accepted form of compensation, when what they actually mean was “money”, as in cold hard cash. In other words, while I thought they were being asked to design a system, it would appear they were just being asked…

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Ignite NYC

I finally made it to an Ignite event, hosted by the lovely Tikva Morowati, and sponsored by O’Reilly. The format is great – five minutes and 20 slides per speaker. The event was pretty fast-paced, and the topics ranged from Samurai swords to Family Feud to data visualization. My favorite? The NASA guy! Apparently aware of what a dinosaur the space program has become, the organization recruited Andrew Hoppen from his fledgling tech startup (he is now the newly appointed CIO for the NY State Senate) to help them get some new thinking into how they operate. His job was to look at the world outside of this giant closed-off…

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