We came to Massachussets – en route from Sanibel to Baltimore – essentialy for two reasons:
- consolidate our relations with Sugarlabs: we met the director of the initiative and discovered an ongoing convergence between our two projects. It really seems we can get together to develop some pieces of software together. Probably a first official step in this direction might be the organization of a joint worksop durin an open source conference soon (so stay tuned for more details)
- get feedback on our project from researchers at MIT media lab: we had the chance to give a short talk to the members of the design lab – we also participated to the reviews of some students’ project on sustainability (what a honor!) Basically, some of the questions asked by the design lab guys are those who always come (e.g., why develop a new workstation and sell a machine, that we’ve answered here before) while some others were quite puzzling. Let me mention just one:
You say you are developing a brand new workstation, so what are you going to do with the caps lock key? It’s really useless and it makes me go crazy, moreover, writing caps is like shouting so you shouldn’t have it… do you plan to replace it with something more useful?
I really had no answer to that
This is funny: we were talking about the CapsLock key just today with the guys and girls from the Interaction Design team.
Mostly joking, we noticed that it’s always difficult to tell whether CapsLock is enabled or not. The solution: create a CapsLock key with an extreme force-feedback, just like the one they used to have on typewriters.
If it’s pressed down and it just went *clunk*, you know CapsLock is enabled
But CapsLock has really no longer a reason to exist!
I don’t know if is possible to cut out so easily an important key like CapsLock … actually is become a standard!
Instead i would see the problem from the other side: does itsme need some new hardware buttons for his functions?