UX nerd

In Buenos Aires, you can often find women selling home grown produce at the entrance of supermarkets. They lay a blanket on the sidewalk and sit on it, next to multiple fruit boxes. In one of these boxes, they usually have a baby. These babies never cry. Actually, the babies are never awake because they give them alcohol to sedate them. This is what allows the mother to work undisturbed from the early morning to the late evening, in the 40°C we get in the summer and the 0°C that are normal during the winter, it’s easier than having to tend a child while they work. The moral of this story? Firstly: these women need help. But also: not everything that makes your life easier makes the world a better place.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an area estimated to be twice the size of Texas that acts as purgatory for all our modern conveniences. Why take your TV to the repair shop when you can get a new one for only twice the price it’ll take to fix it? Like the new iPod 2282th generation? Non-returnable plastic bottles FTW, it’s such a hassle to take bottles back to the store…

Every day, in my job, I come across many “opportunities to make people’s lives easier”. Sometimes you get to choose what you work on, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes, like today, you have a day when you’d rather spend the largest part of it just staring through the window.

This week we have to come up with an idea, any idea, for a product that will help us improve our lives. It shouldn’t be that hard, the Professor said, “I’m sure that there are lots of things in your lives that can be made better” And I’m sure there are. My life would be better if babies didn’t get sedated for their mothers to sell fruit at the entrance of supermarkets and if iPhones and water bottles weren’t floating in a gyre in the middle of the ocean.

Natasha and I will be working during what’s left of this week in an application that allows people to scan products (using their mobile phones) and learn about the conditions in which these products were made and what is likely to happen to them at the end of their life cycle. The idea is to provide information about working conditions of the people involved in the manufacturing process, means of transportation involved in getting the product to you, overall sustainability of the production cycle, agricultural practices, if the company has some kind of recycling plan to collect devices once you want to discard them, presence of any contaminants, etc. Kind of taking Fair Trade certification to the next level, empowering people who can afford it to make a choice.

How would it work? It’ll be hard to have companies disclose that kind of information. But I’m sure you’re familiar with the nutrition facts in your cereal box, and I’m also sure McD didn’t have a ball when they had to print that on the bottom of their Big Mac box and yet it happened. Will it solve the World’s problems? Probably not. Why do I think people would care? Some, certainly, will not. This is one application that will not make your life easier: making choices and acknowledging the effect your choices have in the World is never easy. But some days, like today, I don’t need my life to be easier, I just need it to be better.

edit: I was going to delete this post, I actually did, that’s why I’m reposting. It seems after all that we will be working on something else. As I said, sometimes you get to choose, sometimes you don’t. And yes, I don’t always work on stuff that makes me proud, but that’s life :( Cat family to cheer myself up: