Have you ever been annoyed at being stuck in an ele­va­tor that seems to stop at every single floor? I know I have, and the build­ing I work in only has four floors. Appar­ently the design­ers of the new New York Times build­ing were annoyed too. More impor­tantly, they decided to do some­thing about it:

At our build­ing, a rider pushes a button on a keypad before get­ting on an ele­va­tor to tell the system what floor she’d like to go to. The system then directs her to a spe­cific car which, in theory, will also carry other riders going to that same floor. The idea is to get riders to their floors faster by ‘batch processing’ them, so to speak, rather than seri­ally pro­cess­ing them.

• Ele­va­tor Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion

I think this is a really neat idea. I’m always amazed when some­thing that is so ubiq­ui­tous in our lives gets redesigned. I feel like usu­ally it never occurs to people that some­thing so mun­dane could be made better. I sure hope the usabil­ity kinks get worked out and that people take to the idea.