Design
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Background: The video game Cyberpunk 2077 is set in a dystopian corporate future where life is cheap, but it (surprisingly) features a courteous automotive safety feature. Specifically, some flying vehicles in this setting will project a red “Warning: vehicle is landing here!” grid onto the street before descending, so that no one is crushed by a…
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The Issue: As anyone who has worn a baseball cap knows, the brim does a passable job of shading the wearer’s eyes, but it provides inadequate coverage to the sides of the face and back of the neck, both of which are prime sunburn spots. Proposal: One certainly could just wear a full-360º-coverage hat (e.g.,…
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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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