Can you imagine?

Soren Iverson became known for designing user interfaces that were just a little bit odd. The incorporating something very funny that hinted at some direction technology might go:

Examples:

• You can have a discount on your Uber if you let the driver yell ads at you
• You can pay extra for a concert ticket if everyone is forced to wait for you to leave before they get up
• If someone texts that they have to cancel because they’re sick, Apple Health can inform you that they actually feel fine
• You can see how many people at a company use the “Vice President” title on LinkedIn, to see if it means anything
• You can see what percentage of a company’s employees on LinkedIn are quietly looking for new jobs

And on and on. This book is a collection of 365 of these inventions – he did one per day for an entire year. There’s a picture of each, the title which explains it, and then a couple of paragraphs of discussion. I eventually stopped reading the paragraphs. I would just look at the picture and read the title.

A continuing theme is that there’s a lot of data out there that would very much mess up our lives if it was connected to other data. There are “islands” of data out there that only stay harmless because we can’t see it in context. If all the data about us was swimming in the same pool and could be combined and mined, the results would likely not be good.

Example: texting with a new romance? What if you could see how they saved you in their contacts? By your actual name, or if you are saved as “Hot chick I wanna bang.” What if you’re not saved at all?

Another theme is pay-to-play. Many entires are situations where you can pay extra to remove some inconvenience.

Example: view a profile of the person sitting next to you on a plane, and pay to move them if you don’t like what you see.

It’s a fun book to browse. It’s not a “coffee table book,” because it’s quite small (the pages are hard to turn; heavy, glossy color), but I could see this in a waiting room somewhere.

Book Info