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.