Eco-Drop Shower - Holding your feet hostage to conservation...

The good news: A good, long, hot shower feels great.

The bad news: A good, long, hot shower wastes more and more water and energy the longer it goes.

Since we humans are lousy at delaying gratification in order to make things better down the road, this design makes the gratification much less... gratifying. The Eco-Drop Shower from designer Tommaso Colia on I New Idea features a floor which becomes progressively less comfortable as the shower goes on. See those little rings on the floor in the rendering? They get deeper, more treacherous, and less comfy when you get greedy with the agua. The world - and anyone else sharing your water heater - will thank you!
[via TrendHunter and Gizmodo]

Train Time Indicator - Tells you whether you can make it...

I've recently joined the millions of commuters who depend on trains, and it takes a little getting used to compared to commuting by car. The fact that trains leave only at certain times is the trick, for me - I have to be watching the clock both in the morning and the evening, knowing that I either make the next train or it'll be another wait (sometimes as much as an hour) for the one after that. With that same problem in mind, Tom Lee presents a project of his on DCist: a picture frame which shows, simply, whether or not he has time to catch the current train. The frame shows two amber bars when there's enough time to make it, two red bars when there's not - and the really useful part, one red and one amber bar in the 60 seconds when he'd really need to hustle. I've wasted enough time comparing the clock with the train schedule and doing math in my head that this could be a real simplifying influence on my life, and I'm sure in the lives of many others as well - not to mention something I could point to in order to get coworkers to let me get going! Way to go, Tom - now catch that train...
[via MAKE]

Defendius - Time to think about who you're letting in...

Some people load their front doors with so many locks - knob lock, deadbolt, door chain, floor bolt, maybe two of each - that I'm tempted to think that the time-consuming process of unlocking the door is itself what gives them a feeling of security. Well, for those people (and for a laugh for the rest of us), here's the Defendius door chain from designer Art Lebedev. Totally impractical - unless you just feel safer (an unjustified feeling), or need some time to think about whether you reeeeally want to let that person inside...
[via Engadget]

The Large Display Paradox - Multitasking vs Single Focus...

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror (a blog dedicated to "programming and human factors," good stuff) describes something he calls the Large Display Paradox: that although pretty much everyone considers larger and multiple monitors to be beneficial, smaller monitors actually enable users to focus better on the task at hand. On a smaller monitor, there's no room to have more than one window show at once - so the user picks a task and grinds away at it, with the other windows unable to distract from the task. Also, there's a small amount of time everyone with a large monitor must spend arranging the windows to their liking - I know I do - and even though it's small it'll eventually add up. (And since it's usually done with a mouse, it's not doing anything good for your wrist, either!) So, should we all be switching to old-school 14-inch 1024x768 screens? A one-window-at-a-time speed limit? For our productivity, sanity, and wrist health - and despite our status-symbol huge-screen displays - maybe so!
[via Lifehacker]

Taking Advantage of Misspelling...

You've gotta love capitalism: if there's any way to make money, people will find it - and that includes exploiting design flaws. In this case, the design flaw is the fact that search engines on eBay and other auction sites are very unforgiving of typos - and the way of making money is by searching for common typos in product listings. It makes sense that someone who erroneously lists a "flat screen moniter" for sale is going to get fewer bidders, because those searching for "monitors" aren't going to see it. The typo-searcher can pick up the product at a lower price - and maybe even resell it for a more realistic market value. Some clever folks have picked up on this, and created tools that specifically search for common typo or misspelled variations of whatever you're looking for - Auction Bloopers and the less-catchily-named eBay Auctions Misspelled Search. Of course, an irony of these services is that if they work too well and become too popular, they'll become useless - but in the meantime, get it while the gettin's good!
[via Lifehacker]

USB Sleep-and-Charge - A welcome addition to an established standard...

As standards go, especially from a usability standpoint, USB has been an excellent one. It's ubiquitous (eeeeverything can connect via USB, with very few exceptions), the connectors are physically easy to deal with (good insertion and retention forces, easy to align, no annoying screws), and it just works (devices identify themselves and spring to life, often without needing to install drivers). Lately, it's also perhaps unintentionally become a standard for charging battery-powered devices - even many that aren't intended to ever communicate via USB nevertheless include the standard USB jacks and voltages so they can grab juice from any available port. Toshiba noticed, and made a simple and brilliant accommodation for those devices: USB ports in its latest computers that provide power even when the computer is off (but still plugged in). Now you don't have to leave your (relatively) power-hogging laptop on all night just to trickle-charge a Bluetooth headset. No complaints here - it's just good, usable design!
[Businesswire, via Engadget]

Smart Brakelights communicate difference between a tap and a slam...

I know it's happened to me, it's probably happened to you: on the highway, at a pretty good speed, and the car in front of you stops a lot more quickly than you'd expect. After the adrenaline rush, you can justify it to yourself - sure you saw his brakelights, but thought it was just a little slowdown, not a screeching halt. Well, why can't the brakelight itself show the difference between those two things? Mechanical engineering students at Virginia Tech under Professor Mehdi Ahmadian asked the same question, and came up with a three-stage smart brakelight, shown at right: that's a lit orange bar in the center for a mild slowing, add some flashing red bars on the side for a more significant slowing, and the whole thing flashing red for a severe stop. Those indicators seem to be intuitive enough that they'd work even without this system being widely adopted, especially for any driver following the same car for a little while and seeing the various states demonstrated in the course of normal traffic. And of course, the overall idea of a three-stage brakelight is certainly worthy, brilliant, and an excellent case of a more usable design having the potential to save lives!
[via Engadget]