Just realized why I’m randomly spitballing about unsexy jankiness issues in everyday products (obvious missing features like battery level etc). It’s the opposite approach to Media lab. Domestic cozy over premium mediocre applied innovation.
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I’d rather have something mundane but hard like a battery level indicator in my $30 timed car feeder than flashy but not actually that hard new stuff of unclear value like say a color-changing jacket covered in leds.
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There’s probably value to both approaches, but I have a bias towards using affordances of new engineering capabilities to refactor annoying jankiness out of existing products over imagining entirely new ones that seem like a good idea to some design maven
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This is not the same as incremental or customer-driven btw. This is something like bottleneck-driven or friction-inspired design.
Stuff that’s obvious gaps/cut corners from a design perspective that clearly didn’t get through some trade-off or unit-economics filters.

