How Phonebooks treat SIM cards

I really don't understand. Having replaced a couple of phones under warranty, the SIM card is really the core of "your" phone, much more than the rest of the handset. So why the heck is the default to store contacts on the phone, not on the SIM card? You can move them, but as far as I can tell, only one at a time. Makes zero sense to me.

Postscript: this thread gives some clues. It seems that you need the contacts on the handset to have pictures or ringtones associated with the contact. Okay, that is presumably a hardware constraint, but it still strikes me as exposing WAAAYY too much implementation to the user. Why not just duplicate the contact in both places, if the user chooses to associate a ringtone to it? Why make them have to think about this stuff?

Product Design Idea: Improving the Grocery Cart

When I go grocery shopping for our hungry family of four, the cart fills up. I mean, really fills up. Although I start out putting the crushable stuff on one side, and the heavy stuff on the other, as the cart fills up, it all jumbles together, and some stuff at the bottom inevitably gets squashed.

A nice, pull-up divider would be a great solution. Keep the heavy nicely segregated from the soft stuff.

Value-Added Packaging

I am a big proponent of "value-added packaging". Some recent examples I have come across in my personal, consumer life:

Coleman "wrap and roll" air mattress. This is the third air mattress we have purchased, but the first with this nifty little feature. It is as simple, and low-cost, as could be, but makes the job of storing the air mattress so much tidier. Great example of highly economical value-added packaging. (I think Coleman in general has a lot of VAP.)


MS Mouse 7000 snap-in bluetooth adapter. The bluetooth adapter, an easily mis-placed item, neatly stores in a cavity on the underside of the mouse.

LG Decoy Phone with Built-In Wireless Headset. I don't own this one, but as soon as I read about it I recognized a clear example of VAP driving product differentiation. In fact, I had a very similar idea, years ago, for a built in wired headset, with retractable cord.

Environmentalism Issue Strategy Memo, Part III

In Parts I and II, we looked at how hard it is to get consumers to focus, in a deep and sustained way, on the stuff that really matters in improving the environment. In Part III, I put forth an idea that seems like it might, just might, in some small way, work.

We need a solution that measures and displays electrical consumption in real-time. The solution I envision would involve wirelessly transmitting power consumption data for appliances to a small screen, conveniently mounted in the kitchen or family room. Ideally, major appliances would each have a built-in transmitter. In the meantime, X10-style plug in modules for major appliances would go a long way.

Clever graphical representation of the data would be the other piece of the puzzle. Showing people how much more $ and carbon they consumed the day they kept their thermostat at 72, versus when they set it at 65, etc.

Postscript 2008-05-14

This city-sized, accidental experiment in Juneau is interesting:

“People are suddenly interested in talking about their water heaters,” said Maria Gladziszewski, who handles special projects for the city manager’s office. “As they say, it’s a teachable moment.”

Postscript 2008-01-25

This experiment demonstrates the potential:

The results of the research project...suggest that if households have digital tools to set temperature and price preferences, the peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by up to 15 percent a year.

CFL Light Quality

You read a lot of grumbling about the color/quality of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). I think I am pickier than average about that, and I generally have been very happy with the CFLs I have throughout the house (I typically buy 6-packs of 100W-equivalent at Sam's). However, I did buy a GE Daylight 6500K at Wal-Mart that is just terrible--extreme white with maybe a tinge of blue.

Need a way to retrofit zoned heating into forced hot-air homes

Let's face it, we had our energy wake-up call 35 years ago, and we have continued to live pretty much exactly as before, instead of making changes, some of which might have been more disruptive (less driving and driving alone), some of which seem like they would have been fairly easy.

In the latter category I would put: building houses to be more energy-efficient. I am a notorious home-thermostat nazi, but even I get tired of being chilly in my own house. But I just can't justify heating 3000 square feet, when only one or two people are at home (I work from home 2 days/week, so that one person is often me). The design question is--why do I have to choose between the extreme of 3000 chilly square feet or 3000 warm square feet? We all know that we tend to use 1-2 rooms of the house most of the time, typically the kitchen and the TV room. Why can't I close those off, and have zoned heat that let's me keep them at 72, while the rest of the house cools down to 60?

As I noted, if we had any brains at all, we would have been building houses to support this option, lo these last 35 years. In the absence of that, we need a way to retrofit the typical, suburban forced-hot-air system to support some heating zones. But there would still be the problem of doors--retro-fitting them into my floorplan could be physically done, but it seems like it wouldn't look so good.

(Yes, I know, we also shouldn't have been building 3000 square-foot houses, either. I agree. I would like to trade mine for a townhouse.)

Cereal Packaging Design Value-Add

Cereal is SO much easier to pour out of a bag which has had the corner cleanly clipped off. How hard could it be for the packaging to have a serrated, tear-off corner?

"Think Small" Article on Housing

A good NYT article on ultra-small stand-alone housing options. Interesting stuff. Not exactly what I have been thinking about (Good Design Reduces Need for Raw Space), but definitely in the same spirit.