Wednesday, November 12, 2008

A Better World By Design

I was at the "A Better World by Design" conference this past weekend. It was an amazing conference and my hat goes off to the students at Brown and RISD that put this together. I had the opportunity to meet so many passionate, intelligent people from a variety backgrounds in design, engineering, business, environmental relations.

In the next few weeks, after I have had some time to both reflect on my own as well as confer with my colleagues who also attended the conference, I will be writing on where I see design consultancies fitting into "Designing a Better World" .

In the meantime... a few pictures from the conference







-Chris Loughnane

Notes and Queries for the Design of Everyday Things



created at TagCrowd.com





I know its been a while since I've posted anything of any significance. Work at Farm has been incredibly busy. Aside from the client work, we are expanding into (among other) areas such as research. Our new director of research and usability loaned me a classic, "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman. Like most professional books, it has some very pertinent and useful information... which is unfortunately buried by fluff, redundancy, and unnecessary examples. In any case, I like to take notes when I read or do research. I wish I knew who said it, but trusting the weakest pen over the strongest memory is definitely the way to go. What follows are my notes on Norman's work, complete with page numbers.

I hope you find these notes useful, and encourage you to follow up on any interesting notes with reading the respective section in the book.

Final thought: It really should be called "The Human Factors of Everyday things"




Notebook



The Design of Everyday Things



Warning Labels are signs of design failure
p. ix


Design of Everyday Things



If you think something is clever and sophisticated, beware - it is probably self-indulgence
p. ix


Design of Everyday Things



Ideally, there is no such thing as human error

A thought during p.2


Design of Everyday Things



Affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used
p.9


Design of Everyday Things



When rail shelters had glass, vandals smashed it.  When they had plywood, vandals wrote on it.  Planners are trapped by affordances of their materials
p.9


Design of Everyday Things



Fundamental principle of designing things for people
(1) Provide a good conceptual model
(2) Make things visible

p.13


Design of Everyday Things



Perhaps the designers thought the correct model was too complex, that the model they were giving was easier to understand.  But with the wrong coneptual model, it is impossible to set the controls.

p. 17


Design of Everyday Things



If a feature is in the genome, and if that feature is not associated with any negativity, that feature hangs on for generations.
p.21


Design of Everyday Things



Whenever the number of possible actions exceeds  the number of controls, there is apt to be difficulty

p.22


Design of Everyday Things



If you think that a room will heat faster if the thermostat is turned up all the way to the max,  you are wrong.  It is just an on/off switch

p.39


Design of Everyday Things



Everyone forms mental models to explain what they have observed [religion?].  In the case of the thermostat, the design gives no hint as to the correct answer.  In the absence of external information, people are free to let their imaginitions run wild as long as their mental model accounts for the facts as the perceive them.

p.39


Design of Everyday Things



The Seven Stages act as design aides:

How easily can one:
  • Determine function of the device?
  • Tell what actions are possible?
  • Tell if the system is in desired state?
  • Determine mapping from intention to physical movements?
  • Determine mapping from system state to interpretation?
  • Perform the action?
  • Tell what state the system is in?

  • P.53
     


Design of Everyday Things



wherever labels seem necessary, consider another design

p.78


Design of Everyday Things



Not all of the knowlede required for precise behavior has to be in the head, it can be distributed - partly in the head, the world, and the constraints in the world.

p.54


Design of Everyday Things



Constraints reduce the number of options of the assembly of 10 components from 10! (~3.5M) to a manageable number.

p.62


Design of Everyday Things



The difficulty of dealing with novel situations is directly proportional to the number of possibilities

p.81


Design of Everyday Things



Affordances can signal how an object can be moved, what it will support, and whether anything will fit into it's crevices, over it, under it.  Where do we grab, what parts move, and which parts are fixed.

p.83


Design of Everyday Things



Physical constrains are made more effective and useful if they are easy to see and interpret, for then the set of actions is restricted before anything has been done.

p.84


Design of Everyday Things



Semantic Constrains rely upon our knowledge of the situation and of the world. [Lego driver must have windshield to protect his face]

p.85


Design of Everyday Things



Culutural issues are at the root of many of the problems we have with new machines: there are as yet no accepted conventions or customs for dealing with them.

p.85


Design of Everyday Things



Physical, semantic, cultural, and logical constraints constrain our world.

p.84-87


Design of Everyday Things



The results of ANY action should be immediately apparent

p.100


Design of Everyday Things



One of the virtues of sounds is that they can be detected even when attention is applied elsewhere.  But this virtue is also a deficit, for sounds are often intrusive.

p.103


Design of Everyday Things



When you build an error-tolerant mechanism, people come to rely upon it, so it had better be reliable

p.114


Design of Everyday Things



Human thought...seems more rooted in past experience than in logical deduction.
p.115


Design of Everyday Things



If there were a thousand similar events, we would tend to remember them as one composite prototype.  If there were just on discrepant event, we would remember it, too, for by being discrepant it didn't get smudged up with the rest.  But the resulting memory is almost as if there ahd only been two events: the common one and the discrepant one.  The common one is a thousand times more likely, but not to the memory; in memory there are two things, and the discrepant event hardly seems less likely that the everyday one.
p.118


Design of Everyday Things



To see the relationship between the game of 15 and tic-tac-toe, simply arrange the nine digits into the following pattern:
8 1 6
3 5 7
4 9 2

p.126


Design of Everyday Things



Most major accidents follow a series of breakdowns and errors, problem after problem, each making the next more likely.

p.128


Design of Everyday Things



Although it may not at first seem to be relevant in design, [social pressure] has strong influence on everyday behavior.  In industrial settings social pressure can lead to misinterpretation, mistakes, and accidents.

p.129


Design of Everyday Things



Designers make the mistake of not taking error into account.  Inadvertently, they can make it easy to err and difficult or impossible to discover error or to recover from it.


  1. Understand the causes of error and design to minimize those causes.
  2. Make it possible to reverse actions - to "undo" them - or make it harder to do what cannot be reversed.
  3. Make it easier to discover the errors that do occur, and make them easier to correct.
  4. Change the attitude toward errors.  Think of an object's user as attempting to do a task, getting there by imperfect approximations.  Don't think of the user as making errors; think of the actions as approximations of what is desired.
p.131
 


Design of Everyday Things



Warnings signals, [like labels] are usually not the answer.


Design of Everyday Things



It is important to think through the implications of that cost [of normal behavior, for a forcing function] - to decide whether people will deliberately disable the forcing function.

p.134


Design of Everyday Things



The designer shouldn't think of a simple dichotomy between errors and correct behavior; rather, the entire interaction should be treated as a cooperative endeavor between person and machine, one in which misconceptions can rise on either side.

  • Put the required knowledge in the world.  Don't require all the knowledge to be in the head.  Yet do allow for more efficient operation when the user has learned the operations, has gotten the knowledge in the head.
  • Use the power of natural and artificial constraints: physical, logical, semantic, and cultural.  Use forcing functions and natural mappings.
  • Narrow the gulfs of execution and evaluation.  Make things visible, both for execution and evaluation.  On the execution side, make the results of each action apparent.  make it possible to determine the system state readily, easily, and accurately, and in a form consistent with the person's goals, intentions, and expectations.
p.140


Design of Everyday Things



One negative force is the demands of time: new models are already into their design process before the old ones have even been released to customers.

[Try to give hard products characteristics of software]

p.143


Design of Everyday Things



In the world of sales, if a company were to make the perfect product, any other compan would have to change it - which would amke it worse - in order to promote its own innovation, to show that it was different.  How can natural [Evolutionary?] design work under these circumstances?  It can't.

p.143


Design of Everyday Things



Many of the useful refinements are being lost... All the folklore of design has been lost with the brash new engineers who can't wait to add yet the latest  electronic gimmickry to the telephone, whether needed or not.

p.144


Design of Everyday Things



Designers often become expert with the device they are designing.  Users are often expert at the task they are trying to perform with the device
p.156


Design of Everyday Things



Design is the successive application of constraints until only a unique product is left
p.158


Design of Everyday Things



A toaster offers affordances for danger.  The location, the risk of burning a finger, and the narrow slots, all point to using a knife or fork, which can result in electrocution
p.164


Design of Everyday Things



When there is a problem, people are apt to focus on it to the exclusion of other factors.  The designer must design for the problem case, making other factors more salient, or easier to get to, or perhaps less necessary
p.165


Design of Everyday Things



Whoever invented that mirror image nonsense should be forced to take a shower.  Yes, there is some logic to it.  To be a bit fair to the inventor of the scheme, it does work reasonably well as long as you always use the faucets by placing both hands on them at the same time, adjusting both controls simultaneously.  It fails miserably, however, when one hand is used to alternate between the two controls.  Then you cannot remember which direction does what.
p.169


Design of Everyday Things



Each new set of features adds immeasurably to the size and complexity of the system.  More and more things have to be made invisible, in violation of all the principles of design.  No constraints, no affordances; invisible, arbitrary mappings.  And all because the users have demanded features.
p.175


Design of Everyday Things



One important method of making systems easier to learn and to use is to make them  explorable, to encourage the user to experiment and learn the possibilities through active exploration
p.183


Design of Everyday Things



Design should
  • Make it easy to determine what actions are possible at any moment (make use of constraints)
  • Make things visible, including the conceptual model of the systems, the alternative actions, and the results of actions.
  • Make it easy to evaluate the current state of the system.
  • Follow natural mappings between intentions and the required actions; between actions and the resulting effect; and between the information that is visible and the interpretation of the system state
p.188


Design of Everyday Things



Design should make use of the natural properties of people and of the world:: it should exploit natural relationships and natural constraints.  As much as possible, it should operate without instructions or labels.  Any necessary instruction or training should be needed only once; with each explanation the person should be able to say, "Of course", or "Yes, I see".  A simple explanation will suffice if there is reason to the design, if everything has its place and its function, and if the outcomes of actions are visible.

p.188


Design of Everyday Things



The principles of design are straightforward
  • Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head
  • Simplify the structure of tasks
  • Make things visible: bridge the gulfs between execution and evaluation
  • Get the mappings right
  • Exploit the power of constraints: both natural and artificial
  • Design for error
  • When all else fails, standardize.
p.188


Design of Everyday Things



Actually, increasing the number of controls can both enhance and detract from ease of use.  The more controls, the more complex things look and the more the user must learn about it. It becomes harder to find the appropriate control at the appropriate time.  On the other hand, as the number of controls increases up to the number of functions, there can be a better map between controls and functions, making things easier to use.  So the number of controls and complexity is really a tradeoff between two opposing factors.

p.209
 Combine this with using human factors laws to determine size, qty, and number of controls.


Design of Everyday Things



In the consumer economy taste is not the criterion in the marketing of expensive food or drinks, usability is not the primary criterion in the marketing of home and office appliances.  We are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use.
p.216


Design of Everyday Things



Good design exploits constraints so that the user feels as if there is only one possible thing to do - the right thing, of course.
p.216




Friday, October 31, 2008

The retro cop-out

It seems I have been stumbling across designs like this old 1.44" floppy disk-turned-USB lately. It just seems like a tired approach: taking a new technology and putting it in an old housing. It makes for a cheap smirk, but that's all. Raise the bar.


-Chris Loughnane

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Hold-open clip for gas.

I am not an old man, but I remember the days when I would go to the gas station, start pumping, and be able to slide in the "hold-open clip" so that I could relax my hand.

There safety hazards are obvious (although I can't recall ever hearing of anyone getting injured at a gas station, was/is it common at all?). However, surely there is a cheap design that can sense (most likely mechanically) that everything is "safe"

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Human Factors in Design

I have worked (and am working) in product design consultancies. For those of you unfamiliar with the general setup, they tend to be made up of Researchers, Industrial Designers, and Mechanical Engineers. These consultancies are responsible for the design of many many consumer, industrial and medical products (Check out Farm, Altitude, IDEO, and Design Continuum to see examples).

Something I have come to realize is that human factors does not seem to get the use it deserves. This is not to say it is completely ignored; some Researchers and Industrial Designers have some exposure to human factors. They will use height charts, design for 5th percentile female to 95th percentile male, and other general best-practices. My gripe is that there are so many studies (See HFES journal, and/or ergonomics in design) containing mounds of data regarding posture, grip force, materials handling capacity, etc. that just get ignored.

I am fully aware that every designer cannot get another degree in human factors, but can d-schools not focus more on it in their curriculum? I had a colleague who got his ID degree from Va Tech, and didn't even know who Karl Kroemer was! (I am sure that most if not all of you reading this don't know either, but if you are interested in Human Factors he is an excellent place to start)

-Chris Loughnane

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Disrupting "waste by design"

The blender and toaster. You will find them in almost any home, and I venture to say that the main reason any of them get thrown away is that the appearance becomes dingy, or simply doesn't match with the owner's new kitchen. Why not design a line of these appliances with interchangable shells of different colors, finishes, and textures? Think of the recycling opportunities!

The cop out is "companies are built around selling completely new devices, so 'reusable' doesn't mesh well". I wonder, has anyone looked deeper than this refrain? Perhaps consumers (ugh) would buy 3 or more of these decorative shells ($$) in the same timespan in which they would have suffered with their old, unisghtly device before throwing it away? That would surely offset the cost.

The first company to incorporate such a model into their business would surely gain the much sought after disruptive advantage

Friday, June 20, 2008

Synergy of design for disassembly and shock

One of the more popular refrains of the sustainable design movement is to "design for disassembly". The (correct) theory being that if a part is too difficult to take apart, and is made of more than one materials (like nearly all products are), it will not be recycled. I am a big proponent of designing for disassembly, but have recently come across a problem...shock.

Just think of all of the different products you use in your life that can experience shock (from dropping?) on a regular basis...



TV Remote
Any other remote control for that matter
Xbox controller
Cordless Phone
Hair Dryer
Calculator (I'm a nerd)
every children's toy ever made (it seems)
Cell phones

Whether dueit is unscrewing half a dozen screws on the small remote or trying to crack open the ultrasonic weld on your cell phone, the disassembly (and consequently recycling) of these products can be prohibitively labor intensive.

We are better than this. I am convinced that it is doable to concot some clever geometry (a variation on the good old snap latch) that enables a device to withstand necessary shock while remaining easily disassembled. It is not a tough balance to strike, it is just that we are used to seeing things fastened with a safety margin of roughly 2 gazillion. We can afford to bring that down.

My remote control has 6 screws keeping the two halves together. These screws assure that the plastic shell will crack from shock before it pops in half. However, it is overkill. This small device doesn't need 6 screws. Think critically, what kind of shock is a remote control going to encounter? It will encounter point forces along its body, but what is the likelihood of it striking in such a fashion that the two halves of the remote attempt to rotate about each other like the hands of a clock? Furthermore, even if this unlikely even happens, surely the forces can't be much greater than 20 lbs (an estimation, but I feel comfortable with it. Slap an accelerometer on your remote if you don't). The point I'm driving at is that with some cleverly designed snaps, a remote control could withstand the forces it encounters in its lifetime while still being able to be twisted apart in one motion at its end-of-life.

So what is the takeaway here? Fasteners and ultrasonic welding are a cop-out. Be clever.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Blacktop Turbine

When people think of harnessing the suns energy, they think of solar panels. However, there are other ways.

Everyone knows that in the summer, blacktop pavement gets unbearably hot. So much that if you were to find yourself in a large parking lot sans the foot covers, you would surely be quickly moving across the blacktop to the nearest patch of grass. Why not try to recoup some of that energy?

One option would be for large complexes like malls and stadiums to (the next time they repave) lay down a network of tubing (aluminum? cheap cost for the thermal conductivity) and pave over it.Then, when the air inside the tubing heats up and expands, it rushes to the exit (most likely located centrally, in the stadium, mall, etc.) and power an engine or turbine. The energy created by this would most certainly not power an entire mall, but would be a nice subsidy that could pay for itself within a few years.

The primary problem I see with this is maintenance. In order to ensure good heat conductivity, the blacktop should be in contact with the tubing. This prevents any easy fixes as the blacktop would have to be chipped away to gain access. (Although like any other problem, this can be dealt with)

"Difficult we can do immediately, but impossible?... that might take a few days"

Increase your fuel efficiency, burn less calories through hypermiling

Hypermiling.

Hypermiling has been around forever, its just a new name. For those of you who don't want to read the article, hypermiling is just tweaking your driving habits to increase gas mileage. Most of us have already heard of this, and just don't do it. Personally, I never adopted it because slowing down and driving with more patience (especially on the southeast expressway) has not been worth it. But with gas going where it is, the thought of a 35% increase in gas mileage (thats right, 35%) just might be worth it. In reading this however it got me thinking about cycling.

In the fitness obsessed world that we live in, people are always counting calories (energy) so that they look good naked, feel better about themselves, or whatever other personal goals they may have. It is to the point where I'm sure that somewhere, someone has affixed a calorie counter (typically found on stationary bikes) onto an actual bicycle. They are probably doing it to see how many calories they burn while they are working out. But what if burning calories wasn't the goal? For those commuting to work by bike in the morning, they might just want a lackadaisacal ride to work, not a calorie destroying sweat-festival. I say, why not try personal hypermiling?

Also, this form of hypermiling cuts the waste out of the workout, allowing the user to perfect technique. Sounds like an awfully valuable tool to someone training for endurance. Gotta perfect that waste-less cycling motion

Solar Panel System Design

Solar panels keep getting cheaper, and will eventually get to a threshold where it will not only be environmentally responsible to install them, but financially irresponsible not to. For those of us who are not chemically (the film on the cheap solar panels above is cadmium telluride... sounds intimidating) inclined but would like to aid in the expedition of this eventuality, what do we do? We develop a system or package that optimizes the use of the solar panels.

Relative to our homes, the sun moves in the same path every day. Sometimes it is blocked by clouds, but regardless, the angle will be the same. Why then are all of the residential solar panels I see fixed? The only reason I can think of is that the energy required to move the panel itself is larger than the gain resulting from an optimized angle. For a poorly designed system, I believe this to be true.

For a home with a prismatic (triangular) roof, the peak can be used as a fulcrum on which the solar panels can be placed. Stabilizer pistons can attach each end of the solar panel to the roof (by placing the pistons at the end of each panel, the moment about the fulcrum will be maximized, giving us the most bang for our back regarding force). The energy required to move the panel would be minimal as is the nature of a fulcrum.

There are obviously several details to flesh out, such as the orientation of the house, the aesthetic, weather, etc. But giving the cost of energy, having a simple optimized system installed could be big business. It's my guess that the installation of solar panels will eventually be the wheelhouse of your local HVAC specialist or carpenter, and the first company to create a cost effective way to install a simple and efficient system would surely prosper

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Intelligent Smoke Detector

The smoke alarm has been around for... a long time (look it up). Nearly every product comes with an expanded spectrum of functionality. Why then does a product as synonymous with safety as the smoke alarm not allow for the determination of the nature of the smoke(grease and chemical fires do require different techniques to be extinguished). This would be a relatively simple matter of incorporating some sort of filter or other analyzer. While they are at it, it would be nice if this next generation design would allow me to fry chicken or take a hot shower for more than 10 minutes without setting off the alarm in my apartment.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

A rant on anthropology in Design

So its been over a month since I have last had the opportunity to put in an entry. Life has been hectic with finishing up my senior design project (a bionic ankle), taking other courses, and looking for a full-time job. Anyway, I am not writing this post to lament my lack of free time, but to give a few thoughts on a report I am writing. The subject of the report is Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research by Patricia L. Sutherland and Rita M. Denny. As the title suggests, it is about the ins and outs of how anthropology contributes to consumer research. I am beginning this report with no preconceived notions about what I want to write (trying to minimize the confirmation bias). I have read 30 or so pages so far, and there are a few thoughts that I want to get down on paper, so here they are.

  • It seems every anthropologist, anthropology student, or book on anthropology I read refers (directly or indirectly) to the stigma that is attached to applied anthropology. As Patricia Sutherland puts it, "the label 'applied' was stigmatic". As an engineer, this irks me. I define engineering as applied science. The physicists, materials scientists, biologists, chemists, etc. do the research that gives the engineers the tools to develop solutions. Correspondingly, those anthropologists who have a distaste for the field of applied anthropology are discouraging the use of the anthropological tools that could affect great change in the world.
  • I had a debate in my ethnography class the other day. It was regarding whether or not "social sciences" such as anthropology are "real" in the sense that natural sciences such as biology, chemistry, etc. are. We debated this for a bit and then it dawned on me, "What a stupid conversation this is". Fighting over a naming convention for a field? It is ridiculous! Who cares if some people call your field a science or an art? Let the results of the work done in your field speak for itself.
  • Lastly, Patricia Sutherland points out that in 1971, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) drafted the Principles of Professional Responsibility that prohibited anthropologists from undertaking research that could not be openly published (read: "Any commercial endeavor"). Imagine if the reigning professional association for any other profession gave a similar dictum, nothing would get done ever.
In summary, the gist of the information I have gathered for my report so far is "Get over yourselves anthropologists, if you don't apply what you know, the world doesn't benefit. There are so many people out there that would benefit from the kind of empathetic view only an anthropologist can provide, and as long as the world runs on money, the best way to affect change will be to operate within the commercial realm.


Thats all I got, hopefully I will write again before the month is out.


Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Drawing Blood

First off, let me clarify that I have been posting with less frequency lately not because I see no problems with the world, but because my "capstone" (read: Senior) design project is the development of a new technology for prosthetic ankles, and it is a time suck. However, today I find myself on the train, with some time to kill.

My son goes to the hospital with regularity and thus so do I. One of the things he needs to get done frequently is have his blood drawn so that they can run tests. Being the small boy that he is, the nurses can have difficulty finding a vein. This leads them to poke him several times (heartbreaking), and when that doesn't work, they end up calling a "drawing blood" specialist. Keep in mind this isn't a backwater hospital with untrained people, this is Children's Hospital Boston, which I believe is ranked as the 2nd best Children's hospital in the country.

I don't know enough about the fine mechanics of drawing blood to be able to redesign it here, but the procedure of "tying-off" one's arm in order to get a vein to show seems barbaric. If there is currently a better design out there, why is it not being used by the nurses at Children's Boston?

If there is a device out there (which I am not sure of), I imagine the reason it does not get widespread use is that it has too much visible technology or is too intimidating to use properly. What is needed is a device that looks simple (even if the behind the scene technology is complex), has a short learning curve, and takes the "art" out of the science of drawing blood.


Chris Loughnane

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Philips headphones

I recently lost my old pair of headphones that I used to work out and commute with. I was not about to spend a whole lot of time replacing them, so when I saw a few pairs of them at my local CVS, I figured I would just pick up a pair. As it turned out, I could not have chosen a better set if I tried.

I have been using the behind-the-head variety of headphone and there are a few things that have bothered me. I will list philips solutions tothese problems as well as features I didn't even know I wanted

The behind the head band is too stiff. This peeves me in two circumstances. First, when I slide one headphone off of my ear and have I rest below my ear so that I can answer the phone, the stiffness results in the headphone wanting to spring back up, this applying uncomfortable pressure to the underside of my ear. Second, after wearing them for a while they can cause a headache from the constant pressure. (initially I just thought it was my bad luck that I had an enormous head, but my diminiutive wife agreed with me)

The edges of the foam pads that cover each speaker are captured so that they will not wear and rupture. This was a big problem with my old pair as after a while one could slide the foam right off.

The headphone wire is protected by a braided fabric sheath. This likely has little if any effect to the performance, but it looks stronger, and that matters.

There is a supplementary strain relief cord. Again, this might have a marginal benefit, but u feel much more comfortable when I accidentally drop my MP3 player knowing that there is a separate cable ready to take that force.

So that's about it right now. I will update this later with somE stock photos, but I am on my blackberry on the train and I have got a 15 degree 2 mile bike ride ahead of me... Time to bundle up

-Chris Loughnane

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Audio reader


I am an engineering student set to graduate in may. This being my last semester, I have several slots open for any elective I want to take. Some of my friends chose to take nothing clases such as drawing 101 or CAD (which they already know). This is perfectly reasonable seeing as we all have our "captone" projects consuming any free time we thought we had. I however have recently become intrigued with design research and decided to take an ethnography class as well as a class on sociological statistics. So how is it going so far? Well...

I'm only in week two and the amoun t of reading material is a shock to my system. I am reading about 150 to 200 pages a week and it is a real struggle. It isn't that the material is hard or boring (quite the opposite), its that between capstone, my other classes, my family, sleeping, etc. It is hard to find time to sit down and read for an hour or two.

Now I finally get to my solution... I envision a handheld device that can scan text, convert it to readable text, and have a simulated voice concert that text to audio. This way, you could have any material in a print medium converted to a track that you can listen to while you commute, work out, excercise, etc. I know the technology exists to make this happen, it is just a matter of combining them into a usable product.

Perhaps an attachment to the ipod?

Ps... I wrote this on my blackberry so please forgive any typos

-Chris Loughnane

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Wipe-Free Glasses

I wear glasses about 90% of the time. They are comfortable, and I like the flexibility of being able to take them off when I read. The problem I get is dust. Over the course of the day, little bits of dust get on my glasses, at some point, the dust has accumulated enough to affect (minutely, but noticeable nonetheless) my vision clarity. To get rid of the dust I typically wipe it off on my shirt. The problem with this is that some shirt materials wipe better than others, you may have touched your shirt with your fingers, in which case the oil from your hands which is invisible on the shirt, will become visible on the glasses. Once there is a smudge from oil on your glasses, its game over until you get to go to the restroom and wash them off with water.

Below are some solutions to this problem, and my explanation why they aren't good enough.

  • Use Contacts
    • When I wake up in the morning (especially after I stay up late, which I do OFTEN), it can be slightly painful to put in contacts, as my eyes have not had sufficient time to "wake up"
  • Get Lasik®
    • I have always been a little hesitant about Lasik®, and it did not get better the other day. I am taking a Musculoskeletal Biomechanics course at Northeastern University, and the professor (a proud glasses patron himself) has done research on the eye, and is thus familiar with Lasik®. He told us that Lasik is not based on any biological sort of equation. It is an art, not a science. As such, its replicability is lower than it could be. In light of this information, my hesitancy regarding Lasik® has turned into a firm opposition
  • Carry around a special cloth that I use to wipe my glasses.
    • There may be some people whom can handle this, but it is not for me. I want a design that does not require me to take anything extra with me.


One idea I have is to use some sort of electrostatic property to make the glasses themselves repel dust. If there is no dust, there will be no wiping. If there is no wiping, there will be significantly less smudges and consistently better clarity.


-Chris Loughnane