Culture
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The Issue: Income sources and expenses often operate on mismatched schedules. For example, a person might receive a paycheck every two weeks, but need to pay rent monthly and car insurance every six months. These differing schedules can make it difficult for a person to visualize their cashflow. There are lots of ways to visualize…
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Background: In most houses, the process for starting a shower in the morning is as follows: The Issue: The fundamental issue is that the initial “flush the cold water out of the pipes” handle position (hot water only) is different from the final “taking a shower” handle position (mixed hot & cold water). See Figure…
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Background: In the early 1800s, somewhat before the invention of the Xerox machine and the iPhone camera, the only way to copy a document was to actually write it twice. That is, UNLESS you owned a newfangled “polygraph” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph_(duplicating_device) ), which enabled writing with two mechanically linked pens simultaneously (Figure 1). Proposal: This same technology…
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The Issue: Video meetings can be long and boring, and it’s easy for a participant to drift off while a presenter rambles. Unfortunately, the disengaged participant might be suddenly asked a question: they will then need to either reveal that they were spacing out or to provide a feeble excuse to have the question repeated.…
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Background: English lacks sufficiently granular terms for describing the level of friendship between two people: the primary options are just “friend” and “acquaintance.” This is inadequate for representing reality! The Issue: As a common example of where these terms are insufficient, people often have “work friends” or “school friends” (who they wouldn’t specifically seek out…
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Background: Sometimes, people make references (“literary allusions,” if you prefer) to well-known books, movies, or other shared cultural elements. If the listener recognizes the reference, this can either be a convenient shorthand for describing something: e.g. “it’s a ‘Groundhog Day’ situation“ instead of “it seems like a scenario in which the same occurrence repeats over…
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Background: Apparently there exists a rarely-celebrated “Darwin Day” holiday on February 12 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Day). Charles Darwin is famous for looking at a bunch of weird birds—finches, specifically—and wondering if natural selection could explain the differences in their beaks. If I remember my high school biology, the idea is that each beak type is suitable for eating…
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The Issue: Typically, opening a garage door requires either a key, remote control, or phone app. But wouldn’t it be convenient to be able to open your garage door just by knocking on it in a special pattern (Figure 1)? As it turns out, it is NOT convenient at all! (But read on anyway for…
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The Issue: People living in small apartments frequently have to deal with a lack of storage space. While it’s possible to “just” add cabinets and bookshelves, these take up valuable floor space and make the apartment more cramped. Proposal: There is a surprisingly underutilized storage method that preserves your limited floor space: “just stick things…
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Background: In video games, a major user interface innovation was to color-code different item qualities (or “tiers”). This was popularized (and possibly invented) by the 1996 game Diablo, where boring non-magical items were gray, while enchanted objects were color-coded by quality “tier” (Figure 1). The Issue: The difficulty of evaluating confusingly named objects is not limited…
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