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In Bowling Green, Kentucky, almost everyone agrees that historic buildings should be preserved amid developments. The same goes for having more restaurants open after 9 p.m.; investing in existing cultural institutions, such as museums; and hiring more therapists for public schools. Only a few proposalslike Bowling Green getting its own Dave & Bustersprove deeply polarizing. We know this thanks to a project in which nearly 8,000 residents, or about 10% of Bowling Greens population, submitted their opinions more than a million times over the course of a month about the future of their city. Cities tend to run deep with disagreements about everything from infrastructure to drug legalizationjust look at any local Facebook group or subreddit. But the pro-social algorithm used in this project revealed how aligned residents actually were on most topics. Credit for this undertaking is due to the former first digital minister of Taiwan, Audrey Tang, who advised the project, called What Could BG Be? On a cheerful, interactive website, users can explore city residents hopes and dreams across categories like arts, education, equity and inclusion, housing, and healthcare. The upshot? Most residents have similar desires, and identifying these areas of commonality allows residents to work together toward shared goals. Tang believes in combating what she calls “anti-social” media. Instead, she’s working to use technology to create opportunities for collaboration, thereby strengthening democracies around the world. Born under martial law in Taiwan in the 1980s, for Tang, democracy is not some fossilized, 200-year-old tradition, like it is to some in the U.S. Rather, she says, it’s something like semiconductors, which she believes should be updated regularly with the availability of more advanced materials. Now a senior fellow at the safer tech nonprofit Project Liberty Institute, Tang, 44, builds tools that she can leave behind to empower the next generation with a wider canvas. Concerned about social media algorithms that favor rageful engagement over unity, and having done ample work to maintain democracy in Taiwan, shes spreading her pro-democracy ideas globallyeven as a self-professed anarchist. Tangs childhood was shaped by a heart condition that made waking up each morning uncertain. She internalized the idea of publish, then perish (a riff on academias competitive publish or perish) early and deeply. A prodigy who started coding at age 8 using pencil and paper because she didnt have a computer, she began recording what shed learned before going to bed so others could benefit from her work if she never arose. As a young adult at the start of the millennium in Taiwan, she built civic participation platforms and worked on a project that eventually became known as G0v, which created public, open-source alternatives to often-opaque government websites. That community involvement led to participating in the 2014 Sunflower Movement of Taiwanese students demonstrating en masse against a trade deal with China that the students feared threatened their countrys democracy. During weeks of students occupying parliament, Tang helped livestream debates from inside, eventually leading the government to express public support for the students views. Later that year, Tang was asked to become what she terms a reverse mentor, advising a Taiwanese minister on digital affairs, youth engagement, and open government. She eventually became a minister without portfolio in 2016and the first openly nonbinary cabinet member anywhereand then the countrys first minister of digital affairs in 2022. I famously put not applicable in both the party field and the gender field of my HR application, she says with a laugh. (Tang uses all pronouns and is comfortable with she/her.) This nonpartisan, label-less approach meshes with Tangs efforts toward depolarization. Its not about parties, it’s not about gendersit is about working with all parties, with all genders, she says. Because of this, shes willing to collaborate with people from all points on the political spectrum. In the U.S., for example, shes met with both far-right activist Laura Loomer and Californias Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. She previously applied this ethos to her strategy for Taiwans COVID-19 response, in which she created social messaging designed to appeal across demographics that encouraged people to take key health measures (think: Shiba Inus encouraging social distancing), uniting residents toward a common cause. Her work helped raise trust levels in the countrys government from 9% a decade ago to more than 70% by 2020. But she realized it wasnt just Taiwan that could benefit from her work, so shes taken her teachings on the road. So far in 2025, Tang has traveled to around 20 countries. When we speak in April, shes set to visit another 15 cities in the next 55 days. In most every democratic country shes visited, Tangs heard a similar narrative: that people across the political spectrum are tired of peak polarization. Nowhere has this polarization proliferated like it has on social media. To that end, Tang has advised U.S. Congress members on the risks of TikToknamely, how China could use it against the American people. She helped with the bipartisan efforts to buy the potentially $50 billion social media giant (still underway). But that purchase alone wont stanch what Tang sees as social medias inherently anti-social nature, which she says thrives under opacity. Your feed populates with content the algorithm feeds you based on its popularity and your past views, without any insight into where that content is coming from and how its viewed within the community where it originated. Imagine seeing a post and knowing whether it’s broadly accepted across society or only popular because you’re in that small echo chamber, says Tang. Making that transparent . . . exposes people to the fact that a claim widely believed in one circle might be highly controversial in another. In other words, making context transparent better equips people to avoid spreading misinformation. After transparency, the next aspect of creating pro-social media entails highlighting unifying content. Bridging content is that which shows agreements across social, political, cultural, geographical, and other typical demographic divisions on social media. Balancing content, Tang says, presents a fair, summarized representation of opposing views, ensuring diverse voices, especially minority ones, are heard in a fair way. As you have seen in Bowling Green, [these ideas] hold real promise to heal the social fabric, says Tang. It was just the old, parasitic AI that amplified engagement through enragement. After all, 80% or more agreed on 2,370 ideas pitched by their fellow residents in Bowling Green. The next phase is for volunteers to communicate the projects findings to county leadership so the results can help shape the citys development. Tang has since brought this same strategy to California, working with Governor Newsom on digital democracy platforms with the Project Liberty Institute and other partners. The Engaged California project, which launched in February, initially focused on wildfire recovery and prevention but plans to expand to cover al kinds of debated topics in the state and use bridging and balancing to find what Tang calls the uncommon groundthe points people agree on but traditional social medias algorithms often obscure. Ultimately, the aim is to build broad coalitions across political parties. Overall, these experiments, and her conversations with political figures, have given Tang faith in the U.S. I dont see signs of the American population . . . succumbing to authoritarianism, either in my conversations with Newsom or with Loomer and her crew, Tang says. The U.S. is this grand experiment . . . on how quickly democracy can adapt [in] different emergencies. So far, it has not let the world down. With Tangs help, the aim is to continue on that trackbut first she says we must rouse ourselves from the bad dream of anti-social media and begin using social media for what Tang refers to as broad listening to one another instead of broadcasting. So far, shes proud of the work shes done. Going back to [the idea of] publishing, then perishing, she says, I think I can safely perish, now.
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E-Commerce
Morgan Lombardi, Keurigs senior director of product management, believes pod coffee makers have become too big, too mechanical, and maybe even a little bit ugly. Weve seen that coffee makers, including our own, have started to feel more and more like a machine, she says. They are also getting increasingly bigger while kitchens are getting progressively smaller. Which is why Keurig is introducing the K-Mini Mate, a 4-inch-wide brewer that costs $79.99 and launches exclusively at Target starting June 29.After seven years watching consumer behavior at Keurig, Lombardi tells me she observed that people were starting to view their morning brew routine as an obligation rather than a moment of pleasure. Her team discovered that consumers wanted their morning coffee ritual to feel like this wonderful little momentrather than a mechanical click-CLACK! chore. The coffee maker needed to be gentler to the eye and to the touch, and it also needed to be much smaller. Both were hard challenges, she says, because the current puncturing mechanisms for Keurigs brewers are too unwieldy to allow for a subtler, smaller design.[Photo: Keurig]The space problem drives everythingKitchen real estate drives modern appliance design decisions. Nobodys kitchen is getting any bigger, Lombardi explains. Yet, coffee makers remain essential equipment to turn on human brains in the morning, and they need to be there 24/7not taken out of a cabinet. They require permanent positioning, she says, creating a design constraint that forces manufacturers to think smaller.The most significant technical challenge to achieve the smaller footprint involved redesigning what Keurig calls the puncture mechanism. Standard Keurig brewers use a mechanical crunching motion to pierce K-Cup pods; a big handle pushes down to move the array of needles that open holes in that pod. If you have ever used a Keurig machine, it feels a little like pushing down the handle to turn off the Death Star. The standard Keurig mechanism feels like you are crunching something inside, Lombardi says.[Photo: Keurig]To enable the smaller brewer size, the puncturing mechanism needed to be much shorter: The space between the brewer mechanism and the bottom of the brewer needed to be able to fit a travel mug [around 7 inches], she says.[Photo: Keurig]They managed to reengineer the mechanism and change its position, which allowed them to get rid of the crunching handle and turn it into a flat surface that matches the cylindrical shape of its front. The new mechanism doesnt give you the same hard resistance as the previous one, which allowed Keurig to use soft-spring open and closing. She thinks that this alone creates a feeling thats more human, making the act of making coffee more like a soft handshake and less like destroying coffee pods inside a plastic crunching machine.[Photo: Keurig]A new design languageThe resulting machine is much more attractive. The design language features softer radius curves compared with Keurigs standard angular aesthetic. The brewer uses rubberized touchpoints alongside ABS plastic construction to make it feel softer to the touch, too. A small rubberized tab on the top helps you to take the water deposit out, requiring just a finger to easily remove the top. The water reservoir also sits flat on counters without tipping over, like a water jar.[Photos: Keurig]The resultavailable in black, red, and greenis a machine that brews up to 12 ounces of coffee and is about 33% smaller than Keurigs previous smallest model. One that, perhaps more importantly, doesnt look like your great aunts brewer from yesteryear, but like a modern piece of design.The companys research revealed that younger consumers entering the coffee-maker market prioritize simplicity and visual appeal over advanced features. Generation Z buyers need coffee makers for college or first apartments, but they dont have strong preferences about brewing functionality.[Photo: Keurig]According to Lombardi, consumer response has been great during testing. From initial foam prototypes through in-home use studies, people fell in love with this productand theyre saying, you know, its small. I havent seen anything like this. Its just really cute. When can I have it?She also tells me that the K-Mini Mate represents the first product in what will become Keurigs new visual brand language across its entire lineup. Keurig updates its visual brand language every five years to match shifting consumer preferences, she points out. Future models will incorporate similar aesthetic principles while adding features like larger water tanks. So, thats definitely good news for Keurig fans everywhere.
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E-Commerce
How often do you leave work thinking, Wow, that was fun! Once a week? Once a month? Never? If you arent having funreal funit may be time to rethink your work life, says Bree Groff, author of Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously). The idea that work needed to be fun didnt hit home for Groff until her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2022. She took a leave of absence from her job at a New York-based transformation consulting firm to care for her and her father, who had Alzheimers disease. After her mother passed away, she went back to work part time with a new perspective. One of the things that became obvious while taking care of my parents is that at some point, well run out of Mondays, she says. They aren’t a renewable resource. So, what are we doing to our lives when we’re wishing away five out of seven days of every week? A common attitude is that work is called work for a reason; its something to get through to get a paycheck. The flip side is: Love what you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life. This phrase suggests that the solution to work being drudgery is that it should be your passion and your identity. That notion also didn’t sit right with Groff. Many of the leaders shed worked with were pouring themselves into their work, but they were also sacrificing their health, sleep, and relationships, hoping for a reward that would come someday in the future. It seemed to me that the answer was somewhere in the middle, Groff says. Every day that I spend at work comes out of the finite bank of days that I have on the planet. What would it take to have fun today? If youre not having fun, Groff offers two places to start. Micro Acts of Mischief Too often, people feel they need to be their most buttoned-up, professional, palatable versions of themselves at work. But once we put on a business mask, we stifle all of our vitality, play, and joy, Groff says. Instead, introduce micro acts of mischief into the day. These are moments of diversion to the work culture or routine. If you have to adhere to a dress code, for example, wear some ridiculous socks. Or add a joke or ridiculous font to a presentation deck. Or literally mix things up, she suggests. One day we rearranged the office furniture, pulling comfy chairs over, so we could all hang out a little bit better, Groff says. The facilities team wasnt pleased with us, but it felt a little mischievous, sneaky, and fun in a way that made our team chuckle. Micro Acts of Connections You can also cultivate fun through micro acts of connections, including camaraderie and self-expression. Groff recommends sending a coworker a direct message or email, expressing appreciation for something they did. You can also ask a colleague to grab coffee. Make it light, she says. The idea is to gain a sense of the people you’re working with, knowing a little bit about their lives outside of work. Where do they live? Do they have a pet? Its getting to know them as a human and not just about the work at hand. Also, look for places to show your personality by putting your own stamp on your work. This isn’t just for creative marketing professionals, Groff says. A barista at a coffee shop can make latte art. Or a project manager can make a brilliant project timeline. How can you put your stamp on your work? Connection and self-expression humanize the workplace, Groff says. We should like the people that we’re spending our days with. Sometimes, we’re spending more time with our colleagues than our families or significant others.” Are We Having Fun Yet? Groff says you can usually tell if you’re having fun, and you can always tell if you’re not. It’s almost childlike in its sensibility. I define fun as a sense of play, experimentation, and vitality. My metric for the day is: How many minutes have I spent laughing? Dont confuse fun-looking workplaces with fun work, Groff adds. Theres a difference between thinking of fun as icing on the work cake, or fun as being the cake itself, she says. If we look at fun as the icing, thats where Ping-Pong tables or happy hour get a bad rap. You cannot fill your days with Ping-Pong and happy hour, or nothing gets done. Id also argue that is a superficial sliver of fun. Having fun at work is using your skills in a way that makes you feel good because you contributed and made an impact on customers, clients, or other parts of the organization. While there is a business argument for having more fun at work, such as increased productivity and performance, the existential argument is much stronger. If I’m a manager, I don’t want to end my career thinking, I really extracted every last hour from that employee or I made them perform better for the business, Groff says. I want to make sure that these humans have made good use of their days on the planet. That they’ve gotten to contribute joyfully and profoundly.
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E-Commerce
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