Dominant Design

Dominant Design and the Future

The classic computer mouse.

From humble beginnings as just a set of two wheels, the mouse has gone through several designs to reach what we know today. The majority of it was there by the time the trackball was invented: two buttons, left and right. Nowadays, the main difference is in the tracking method: we use much higher precision lasers than the trackballs could ever hope to achieve, and we've added a scroll wheel. Sometimes, there are extra buttons on the side, which come in handy quite often. Sometimes, the mouse is wireless, sometimes it is wired. And although there exist some other designs that seeks to fulfill the same function, such as Apple's Magic Mouse and the Ergonomic mice that promise better form, I personally have never seen a single one of either in everyday use.

How you connect your peripherals to a computer.

The Universal Serial Bus interface has certainly earned its name. Before it came a time of much chaos, with printers, mice, keyboards, and monitors each having their own connection standards. External drives had quite the selection of possible connections as well, from eSata to FireWire. Sure, all of these still exist in some capacity today. One might need a PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard to access the BIOS before the computer can load USB drivers. And if you're one of the people with the first gen iPod classic, you can thank Steve Jobs for using FireWire. But we've seen quite the jump in USB recently. From a maximum transfer speeds of 480 mb/s with 2.0 to 5 gb/s with 3.0, and now 10 gb/s with 3.1, the technology is advancing quite rapidly. Printers are now almost exclusively USB enabled, as are mice, keyboards, and external drives. And with the advent of Thunderbolt 3 via USB 3.1 type C, we're even seeing power, video, and even external graphics processing all over this one tiny little cable. It took a while, and it still has a ways to go, but Universal is right.

Phones.

Yes, phones in general. Landlines have gone the way of the dinosaurs, at least for the average household here. As for mobile, we've gone through so many different iterations of designs, from the bulky and somewhat impractical cellphones of the past to the flipphones that everyone loves to make fun of, and even phones with pullout keyboards. But now, we're left with just one design: A touch screen, few physical buttons to interact with, and a sleek design that many would never have thought possible in the past.

The mattress you sleep on.

Sure, there might be different alternatives to what you put inside it. Springs, water, synthetic foams, all that stuff. But on the outside, almost every mattress is the same: a really, really heavy rectangular prism.

The shirt you're wearing.

Though it may be partly due to fashion changing, we've seen several different designs, from the loincloth to the toga all lose out to the simplicity of the t-shirt.

Designs Currently in Education and Healthcare

• Smartboard: From the chalkboard to the whiteboard, and finally the smartboard. In addition, it also replaces those slide projectors that were so finicky to get working.
• Flipped Classroom: This one's quite the innovation, I believe. instead of teaching every student the same way, then having them practice outside of class, reverse it. Change it up. Have students study outside of class, which gives them the freedom to do it however they learn best, and have them practice and ask for additional guidance in class. Perhaps this is the best way to implement Common Core.
• Big Data: As the world inevitably grows more connected, more and more data is going to exist, whether we like it or not. Healthcare has one of the fastest growths of metadata out of any industry, and it's not slowing down. More data does have some privacy implications, but ultimately it is a boon to those in healthcare.
• The Coming of AI: With all that data comes the responsibility to process it, however. Artificial Intelligence is definitely capable of doing just that. The biggest player is IBM's Watson, who claims to be capable of helping every position within the healthcare industry and beyond, something I am quite confident in.

So what's going to be the next big thing?

Education: Flipped Classroom

Healthcare: AI