I’ve been thinking a bit about ingenuity this week, which my mac dictionary tells be means ‘he quality of being clever, original, and inventive’. I have in mind collecting some examples of ingenuity as a blog topic and an inspiration.

Here are two I stumbled across at Tecznotes blog while researching Modest Maps which was used to build the Oakland Crimespotting map, both ingenious bits of tech in themselves.

Wooden maps carved by the Ammassalik of east Greenland
The image to the left above is of one of these wooden maps. Bill Buxton describes these ‘maps’ in hi book Sketching User Experiences.

…shows the coastline, including fjords, mountains, and places where one can portage and land a kayak. Such maps can be used inside mittens, thereby keeping the hands warm; they float if they fall in the water; they will withstand a 10 metre drop test; and there is no battery to go dead at a crucial moment.

Also they’re beautiful. Not much I can add to that, I just loved this bit of low-tech genius.

More from Tecznotes on this.

Federal building in San Francisco

This one is a piece of ingenuity to combat a thoroughly modern problem. We all work in office buildings and we’re getting fat, generally speaking. To work against that problem the new Federal building has elevators that only stop on every third floor.

The elevators only stop on every 3rd floor, “to improve worker health by nudging them to use stairways - and also create crossroads where employees run onto each other, since each three-story segment includes a lobby with art and a viewing platform.”

More from Tecznotes on this.

First of all an apology, when signing up to a new book-centred social networking site (Shelfari) I accidentally caused an email invite to the site to go out to everyone in my email address book. For christ’s sake, I’m supposed to be an Internet professional no? Not a bloody spammer or an idiot, at least that’s not what my business card says. So by sincere and very embarrassed apologies to everyone who got that email.

So that’s the apology part. The user interface part is to the point: please think about the outcomes of the design decisions you make when building a web app (or anything else for that matter).

In this case bad judgment on my part and poor UI (User Interface) design on Shelfari’s part lead to the presumable irritation of the hundreds of people in my address book who got this email invitation in error and my burning (but hopefully short-lived) embarrassment at letting this happen. But you don’t make converts to your social networking web app thingie by causing intense embarrassment, unless your app is masochist.com perhaps.

There’s another whole post in here about how to effectively share information about who you are and who you know online. OpenID and FOAF are just a couple of projects looking at solving parts of this problem effectively. I just hope someone gets there soon, like yesterday would be ideal.