Adobe Student Suite - Does not include real time collaboration

Adobe suites/apps are one of the most highly pirated software out there. Larger businesses can afford to pay for the Adobe suites, the [design] students and small businesses are the ones hurting from the ability to pay for the products legitimately.

Instead of turning a blind eye on the [design] students' companies who will in the future pay by bringing the product/tool to their work environment or the 'dumbed' down Adobe products which may be good enough for family photos/videos, here's the proposal:

Now with the technology to enable real-time collaboration, let that be the premium service one pays for: real-time collaboration backend on the Adobe suites. (Easier said than to engineer real-time collaboration for vectors and direct pixels, but hey, this is a 5min idea.  Microsoft OneNote began to do so on the client side and now on the web with the Office Web Apps...)

Real-time collaboration between adobe files are essential for the productivity of design teams. Right now design teams need to work around this by breaking up our books into tiny singular files so we can have different members of the team work on different pages of the same 'book'/'project' in InDesign.

Students who typically are working alone, learning to master the apps, don't require the real-time collaboration with other cohorts. Let the cost of the 'professional' design features in the Adobe suites be now part of a base affordable price (say~$50).
Medium/Large Businesses then are paying for the premium to support complex real-time collaboration service.

Freemium++

Picture Ornaments

Love how easy it was to trace old family picture calendars to the template and insert it into the ornaments to hang on the tree. :-)
Quick & easy, personalized decor~

DIY Light Switch Labels

Been wanting to do this to our new house as I still haven't gotten the light switches memorized. Johnny happened to have some sticker labels and voila! Johnny insisted we tape over them to protect them; I on the other hand am ok if they get old and dirty; that will give me another oppotunity to think on them and see what better labels I can come up with for the next round ... :)

ceiling fan & light using a UFO metaphor

aahh, the trouble maker power plug switch in the living room ...

Closet Sound Barrier

I never understood the floor plans of a narrow, windowless closet in between the bathroom and the bedroom.
However, since we moved to our new house, I suddenly understood the genius of the closet as the sound barrier between the bathroom and the bedroom!
Our current bathroom layout opens right into the bedroom so that if one spouse needs to wake up earlier than the other and get ready for work, the flowing water, hair dryer wakes up the spouse still in bed:

So, instead of just another narrow closet in between the bathroom and bedroom floor plan, I thought I might as well try a redesign with my preferred typical Japanese bathtub + shower layout -- a 'water proofed' room housing both the shower & bath tub side by side so once one's cleanly rinsed via the shower, he can jump right in and soak in the steamy bathtub.
This particular layout tries to retain a similar dimension as the current layout:

We could even insert one of those tiny sinks in the water closet. The flaw with this layout though is the toilet's placement right next to the closet which may seem disconcerting ... This layout also moves the closet sound barrier from the next door bedroom.
In spite of the downside however, note the penetrating skylight in the sound barrier corridor!

Extended handles on cleaning brushes

Lately, I've come to appreciate the extended handle designs on cleaning brushes.

My hands get all wet and soapy from a quick clean up when I'm in direct contact with the brush/sponge, I'm too lazy to wear clumsy gloves; extended handle brushes are now my favorite 'user friendly', ergonomic, multi-angle-versatile household tool!

Not a drain - affordance design

At the Microsoft kitchens, we have these water machines with the typical 'this is not a drain' - do not pour water into the slush tray:

 

The design of this specific water machine simply has the design affordance for one to think they are hooked up to the water pipes and hence that slush tray, one would think, would work like a sink drain.

Note that the water machines are even inset into the kitchen counter for me to assume that it's hooked up to the water out pipe.

And so I daydream, if only the machine had a visible bottom where one can obviously see that there is no drain in the slush tray (aided by a lighter interior, perhaps even white to psychologically make people afraid about dirtying the nice white interior!). And I suppose the water-in pipe will just have to invisibly be hooked from the back or bottom, ideally at the top of the machine so again users would assume the mental model that it's the in-pipe and not the out-pipe...

Of course ideally, the water machines should be hooked with an out-pipe if not for the extra cost ...

Extra IKEA parts. A service design.

I'm probably not the typical IKEA customer but for us frequent IKEA shoppers, at some point, we have bought so many IKEA furniture and hate throwing away good useful extra parts/tools that comes with the simple 1-2-3 DIY boxes, it seems very wasteful to keep getting parts I don't need but have no where to dispose of them fruitfully.

So. How about this?
What if IKEA had a fun station for the frequent buyers with a ton of spare parts of some parts and not others, where there's a dispenser that automatically dispensed the parts we'll need to build the furniture we just bought, bag up the ones we are lacking and put the rest back in the 'Extra Parts Bin'.

Click to Enlarge

And like a coin organizer, the extra parts bin can easily organize all the various parts to the different components and feed back to the parts vending machine.

IKEA today already currently have stations in the back door to get some extra parts.

The proposed assembly line system can also feed to this back door supply and make it fun and gadgety to get extra parts :)

I love these self service stands; I feel more part of the shopping and building experience.
It's not for everyone, especially if you want a quickie at crowded IKEA. But perhaps Mr. Ford might approve of this self service assembly line... :)
I love optimization problems. In another universe, I might've studied Operations Research Industrial Engineer ...