Design
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Background: A trend started in the 2020s where car owners would affix stickers to their car reading “Student Driver: Please Be Patient!” (Examples: https://www.google.com/search?q=student+driver+stickers+fad). For some reason, the wording of these stickers is almost always identical: “Please Be Patient” or “Thanks for Your Patience.” Proposal: The goal of these stickers seems to be to increase the…
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The Issue: In grocery stores, many snacks are sold in gigantic jumbo size packages. It can be hard to resist the compelling economic argument in favor of these snacks: you might get TEN TIMES as many potato chips for only twice the price. Unfortunately, this means that you may later feel compelled to actually eat…
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The Issue: Depending on climate and the distance from a hot water heater to a shower, it can take 60+ seconds of running a shower to finally get warm water from the shower head. That means that a full minute’s worth of shower water is going straight down the drain, for no benefit to anyone!…
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Background: In the ancient times of “video arcades,” progress in a game was partially limited by the number of quarters in a player’s pocket. Certain arcade games were often theoretically winnable by anyone, as long as that person was willing to spend $100+ on the attempt. The Issue: After home consoles killed the video arcade,…
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Background: One great idea for encouraging people to get exercise is the 2012 phone app “Zombies, Run!” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombies,_Run). This program gauges the user’s jogging progress by monitoring their phone’s GPS location, and it periodically warns the user that a horde of virtual zombies is chasing them. This should motivate the jogger to temporarily speed up…
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Background: When learning a foreign language, it can be difficult to advance beyond the stage of extremely basic competency. Once a person can “kind of” use a language, it is rare that their communication attempts will be corrected by random strangers, so that person will end up saying things like “Here, there is pancakes served?…
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Background: One major concern for any civilization that lasts for more than a few billion years is: what is the best long-term method to reliably store and retrieve energy? Solar panels on a planet work great, but only capture a tiny fraction of total solar output. Some ideas exist for working around this (Figure 1),…
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Background: Many people find the relentless piling up of emails in their inbox to be stressful. There are various approaches for dealing with this. The most well-known is probably “inbox zero,” which recommends triaging emails when they’re relatively new (instead of procrastinating and letting them pile up). Although “inbox zero” doesn’t require that you should…
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The Issue: When a person is walking around a corner, there’s always a chance that they’ll unluckily collide with someone walking the opposite way (Figure 1). The fundamental problem is obvious enough: there’s just no way to see around the corner. Hospitals and parking garages frequently solve this issue by placing a big convex mirror…
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The Issue: Washing machines and clothes dryers save an immense amount of time. But there’s still a significant bottleneck in the pipeline from “dryer” → “pile of clothes” → “dresser / closet”: specifically, the process of actually identifying each article of clothing (Figure 1). Before the pile of clothes can be sorted and put away, the clothes-washing individual will…
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