At one point, I was resting on a hip thrust machine, letting my mind wander without auditory stimuli beaming directly into my brain - kind of nice, actually - when a woman called, "Hey, do you have a second?" and asked for advice on using the belt squat machine. I was happy to help, and we chatted for a bit before exchanging friendly goodbyes.
Designers Ye Jin Lee, Jung A Park, and Yujin Lee definitely think so, because they created FURNY to solve exactly this problem. FURNY isn't your typical furniture design project. It's a mobile furniture system specifically built for co-living spaces, and its entire purpose is to help people start conversations without that painful awkwardness we've all experienced. The concept is simple but clever: what if furniture could be the friendly person who breaks the ice first?
Memory isn't just a mechanism for storing all of the information you encounter. Instead, it helps you to hold onto information that is likely to be useful for reducing effort in the future. That is why, for example, when you work hard on something, you're more likely to remember it later. Memory encoding mechanisms use that effort as a signal that learning something about the situation will probably make it easier to deal with a similar situation in the future.
People will sometimes read a story or see something online that upsets them and want others to feel that same level of distress so that they know they're not alone. What this response often lacks is consent. Yes, the news is public information, but how we receive that information, process it and react to it is still personal. She didn't respect a boundary that you set. That says to me she was less interested in commiseration than in misery.
During a recent business dinner in Panama, guests were encouraged to store their mobile phones in locked bags, promoting a phone-free experience. This approach resonated well with older attendees, while younger guests displayed significant cravings for their devices once the dinner ended.
