At the W Hotel chain, the in-room soaps they use are by bliss. I’m not a soapaholic or anything, but I do enjoy the construction of their bar-of-soap product. The annoying habit of soap to slip around in the tub vanishes by design with the integrated feet on the bar’s bottom. Since I came across this design a year ago, it’s always stuck in my mind as a sort of anomaly. Of course soap dissolves, and thus the bar’s little feet dissolve with it. There’s something about its initial presentation as a can-do kind of design that instills immediate trust in spite of knowledge of the soap bar’s eventual demise. I wonder if there are other such cases.

Yesterday I had lunch with celebrity designer Frank Nuovo, formerly of Nokia. He showed me his designs from the mythical Vertu line of luxury phones. I didn’t get to touch the actual objects as maybe he didn’t trust me. One of the phones was made of platinum at a pricetag of $30K, and he also mentioned something about custom lasercut ceramic buttons on the face with handpainted lacquer backs. It sounded so good, and given that our meals hadn’t arrived yet, his rich descriptions of the devices made me feel even more famished.

The UI for these devices seemed simpler than the average mobile phone. But since I’m unlikely to ever shell out 4K+ for one of his beautiful creations, I guess I’m stuck getting lost in a cellphone’s menu tree. Does simplicity always have to cost more?

Today, as a kind of tribute to a beautiful fall day in New England I created a number-to-text translation system. It’s helped me to remember the White House’s fax number using the simple phrase, “Ao chko iiii!” Uh, that might not be much simpler to remember of course …