Better Decisions Through Data.
We posted this back on our Facebook page back in January in response to our then-very popular climate dress article. Although our posting is intended to be funny, there is a serious point: perhaps we have a lot to learn from fashion design on how to make better GUIs for our electronic devices and gadgets.
We did actually contact the designer, Diffus DK, as mentioned in the Facebook post, quoted below. We had a nice discussion about some of the other products they are working on, including some home furnishing designs and interfaces.
(We probably should have posted here instead of on Facebook. As due to the “new” algorithms Facebook has been gradually rolling over the last few months, this blog gets much more readership than posting to Facebook page will. This has infuriated some marketers, who spent a great deal of money buying supposedly highly-targeted, highly-engaged Facebook likes from Facebook at cost typically of maybe $1-$2 or more. At one time, posts from brands and companies would appear in the feed of everyone who like that brand. So marketers may have thought they were getting their money worth. Indeed, there are studies that show, for an event like a concert or sports game, each Facebook like on the post added on average $1 to revenue. But then Facebook changed the algorithm. Some studies show only 6% of followers now see the company’s posts in their timeline. So, if Facebook likes used to be worth $1 for an event, now they are only worth $0.06, but Facebook still charges the same or more? It may not be fair comparison, since the “likes” the study was measuring may have been slightly different. In any event we have drastically curtailed our Facebook postings. Why waste time if Facebook supposedly will only let 6% of our Followers see our posts? We can get a lot more views on our blog. Perhaps a topic for a future post….)
Here is the posting, originally on Facebook:
The response to our air pollution designer dress story was impressive (particularly on Twitter). We are smacking our heads now. Why would we think that the best readout for home air quality would be an iPhone app?
Obviously, a dress is much easier to use, and is much easier to install in your home than either an air quality sensor or an iPhone app.
One concern we do have with using a designer dress as a device user interface is that we expect the dress is much more expansive that our free iOS app … or the app plus the sensor plus the air purifiers.
However, for the well-to-do for whom price is no option, a designer dress user interface to read out air quality may be the top-of-the-line in indoor home air pollution monitoring. Along those lines, we’re contacting the designer to find out if there are any plans to make an optional fashion model available as an add-on to the dress.
[…] attempts to manipulate models and their interpretation). [For our readers coming over from our fashion design section, we are talking about mathematical models […]