Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Zone of Silence (02 May 2005) Fried made the Wave Bubble for her master's thesis, "Social Defense Mechanisms: Tools for Reclaiming Our Personal Space," which argues that electronic devices increasingly distract and annoy people and that the electronics industry has had little incentive to address the problem. She concludes that citizens must therefore explore methods of self-defense. Against television she has built Media-Sensitive Glasses, which darken their lenses upon detecting the characteristic 59.94-hertz flicker of a TV set. Perhaps it's not a very practical solution, as the wearer wouldn't be able to see other things, but Fried is making an almost artistic statement, not laying out a business plan. Article URL: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/may05/0505nmit.html Read 83 more articles from IEEE Spectrum sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Industrial Design: Claims Without Substance     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy