ctrl.altered.mind

The design principle of a car door has not changed much since the very first concept automobile, save for a few advancements in high end supercars (such as the scissor door design, made famous by the Lamborghini Countach). Scissor doors, however, also suffer from the same hindrance as conventional doors and can impede access to some extent.

The Disappearing Car Door design seeks to change all that. This modification reworks the vehicle architecture to allow the front and rear doors to be concealed under the framework, thus providing some significant benefits as described in the video.

The principle structural design change is the elimination of the B pillar. While this modification may reduce the structural integrity of a conventional vehicle, some reinforcement can be designed into the A and C pillars, as is the case with convertible designs.

In addition to the benefits described in the video, the Disappearing Car Door design could also aid rescue efforts in the event of a collision by reducing the need to cut vehicles open. It would be quite interesting to see if this kind of traversal from conventional design is adopted by car manufacturers in forthcoming models.

I came across an interesting feature while reinstalling Skype on my notebook computer - one called Skype Prime. This program is a (relatively) new addition to Skype’s family of services, and like most things Web 2.0, is still in beta. Apparently, the feature has been available since March this year, although I didn’t hear or see anything about it until today. This service uses the tag phrase, “Get paid for sharing your skills, or learn something new”. If you guessed paid phone services, you were quite right.

Skype presents you with an opportunity to earn (big bucks?) by letting you create your own personal ‘call center’. Anything that can be taught over the phone, is up for the offering. You could teach people a new language or narrate horoscopes, while charging them a fee (either per-minute, or a one-off charge). People who call in to avail of your services, will need to use their Skype credit to make payments - the minimum per-minute fee for any service is €0.10 (although that could possibly drop further in the future, as people start seeing greater value in having or providing such a service online, instead of setting up toll-access lines the conventional way).

Just a little online investigation regarding the marketability of this program has me convinced of its value. People are already familiar with the concept of being charged for receiving answers to their questions and problems online (through the popular Yahoo! Answers marketplace). I can easily see someone add the sentence “Call me on Skype if you need additional help with installing your new router (for example)” to their Yahoo! answer.

All this has me thinking.. how clichéd would it be to set up my own personal tech support line as an experiment? Riiight, an Indian guy on the line here on Skype too? At least I’d be charging less than your ‘friendly neighborhood‘ Geek Squad. Thank you, come again.

I snapped this picture at a local grocery store, where a kiosk’s sole function of displaying catchy ads for coupons and new products was marred by a familiar Windows error, although not quite as attention-grabbing this time as the other one I had blogged about.

(click for larger image)

Interestingly, the command line reveals that the kiosk runs Laplink Everywhere, commercial software that allows remote access to a PC from anywhere. I guess all the kiosks from the store (and across the country) connect to a central machine that selects the advertisements to be run by the store, and thus rely on 24/7 internet connectivity for their operation. Given that the kiosk is using a capable machine with a complete Windows XP installation, I would have guessed that a better design would be to run local custom software and just provide daily (or even hourly) updates via the internet connection - which is also the way most Windows spyware work.

Of course, capital costs could have been cut significantly if the kiosk ran cheaper x86 hardware with a basic Linux installation - although I wonder if that was even an option considered by the company that designed the kiosk.

The Government of India has recently set up an online grievance forum with the intention of opening up a more direct line of communication with citizens, who can use this tool to highlight problems faced when dealing with Government officials and/or departments. Avenues that immediately come to mind include (but are certainly not limited to) the Passport Office, Electricity Board, BSNL/MTNL, and the Railways.

Submissions to the forum may not be falling on blind eyes after all, if unconfirmed anecdotal evidence making the rounds on many online message boards and by email, is to be believed. It talks about a certain CSC employee in Faridabad who used the forum to log a complaint about the local municipal corporation digging up newly paved roads to install cables - an annoyance most of us in India have had to deal with. Apparently, this was successful, as the BSNL and the Faridabad Municipal Corporation were served a show-cause notice soon after. While it is not clear if the online forum played a vital role in bringing the two departments in sync with each other, it is definitely a tool that more of us can make use of.

Unfortunately, the website (as with most other government-controlled websites in India) suffers a great deal in the aesthetics department (I doubt that any sense of design even exists for the persons in charge of getting websites implemented). With a heterogenous mix of poorly selected html design elements and colors, spending too much time browsing the site can drive one to poke their eyeballs with a fork, in disgust. Alright, dramatic effects aside, I guess a complete redesign of the site (with a hint to derive some inspiration from other functional and spartanly designed administrative websites around the world) would be my choice for a grievance to be filed on the forum. Let’s see how that goes.

‘Shift Happens‘ is a presentation by jbrenman; a stylization of a slideshow originally created by Karl Fisch, examining globalization and America’s future in the 21st century. This won Best Presentation and the People’s Choice Award on Slideshare.net.