Exposure to design thinking has set off fireworks for me in terms of my daily routine, and has sparked further consideration of how people tend to extemporize many of the tools in their environment at work, home, etc. For example, when the Library switched to a new ILS (Integrated Library System) about 5 years ago, staff were provided some basic training, but we had to figure all the minutiae of manipulating the system on-the-fly. We had to adapt our previous mental model to new (and sometimes unnecessarily byzantine) processes for performing the same tasks. How could our work be made more efficient if UX practices and methods had been synthesized in the software development process for this tool?

In a recent family visit, my mother-in-law – a casual home baker – mentioned how cumbersome she often found using her candy thermometer. Her chief complaint was that the thermometer obstructed stirring of her caramel sauce, but she wasn’t comfortable not using temperature to gauge precisely when the caramel was ready. The more I considered her problem the more I realized I had the same problem: When the contents of the saucepan require constant whisking, I either must stop what I’m doing and take the temperature, or I can clip the thermometer to the side of the pan and leave it there throughout the cooking process. But it’s a hassle to stop whisking and to use more than one tool at a time. The clipped thermometer gets in the way of a smooth stir and can scratch and damage your nonstick cookware. The following morning at breakfast a potential solution occurred to me: What if the thermometer was built into the whisk? Each tine could take the temperature individually, then the computer could average the individual temperatures together and display it on the readout, which could be located above the handle, on top so the user could see easily as she stirred and so as not to impinge on a flexible, ergonomic grip. This “thermometool” (What would you call it?) could even provide the user with detachable whisk and spatula tools for candy making or chocolate tempering. Maybe an app could be used to change the settings, so the user wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally pressing buttons on the handle.

Over the last week I’ve been ruminating on this and other alterations of everyday objects: How about a vegetable peeler that doesn’t get carrot shavings stuck in the blades? Speaking of blades, what if there was a small swivel mirror that could attach to your razor to make hard-see-places easier and safer to shave? What if my oven/range could run on a renewable fuel source that functions like natural gas but is clean like electricity? And why hasn’t someone produced a car that runs on water? The possibilities are endless!

Design thinking is a revelation.