Furniture
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Background: Architects normally design homes and offices primarily to suit the needs of their occupants. The issue: Unfortunately, an easy-to-navigate floor plan is also easy for burglars to navigate! Proposal: Luckily, we don’t have to make any architectural changes to fix this problem—by adding a few strategic (and cheap!) furnishings, a house can become MUCH…
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Background: Extremely large TVs have now become cheap enough to use as gigantic computer monitors. It’s possible to find a 55+” television with high enough resolution and low enough latency to work as an external monitor for even the most discerning computer-ologist. The issue: Most desks are not set up to accommodate a 55″ television…
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Background: The traditional flat-surfaced desk has been more-or-less unchanged for thousands of years. The issue: People often place a drink on their desk. However, this makes it very easy to accidentally knock the drink over onto (depending on the era) a stack of rolled-up papyrus scrolls, a Gutenberg Bible, or a laptop (Figure 1). Proposal:…
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Background: Since laptops are so convenient and portable, many people work in locations that are not set up for long-term ergonomic comfort (for example, dining room tables or coffeeshop counters, e.g. Figure 1). The issue: Since these locations were never designed for laptop use, they are typically set up in such a way that the…
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TITLE: Never be annoyed when emptying an over-full trash can again, with this new “screaming trash can” technology! The Issue: In shared-living or office situations, there is a strong incentive to wait for someone else to empty a full garbage can: the person who discards the last piece of trash has only contributed a tiny…
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Background: It’s difficult to move heavy furniture around, so furniture is usually positioned for general use, even if there are specific setups that would be better for rare situations. For example, your home might have a room that would be best configured in one way for watching movies, but a different way for a Thanksgiving…
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The issue: Both humans and automated vacuum cleaners (e.g. Roombas) find it inconvenient to operate a vacuum cleaner around furniture—specifically, no one wants to move extremely heavy furniture just to vacuum around the legs. Proposal: Most furniture is still stable even when not all supporting legs are contacting the ground. So why not have telescoping…
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Background: Early 3D games used a relatively small number of polygons to create a blocky “low-poly” approximation of a game environment. Three styles that occasionally come close to the low-poly look are: Mid-Century Modern Scandinavian design (e.g. IKEA) Brutalism But none of these styles are specifically aiming to minimize the number of visible surfaces in…
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Background: The humble door-locking deadbolt has suffered from a severe failure of innovation and imagination in the last 100 years. Specifically: most deadbolts have exactly two positions (Figure 1): Open (door can be opened from either side) Closed (door requires a key to open from the outside or a switch to be operated from the…
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Background: This is an alternate version of the previous table-related idea (see link here), which involved hanging a table from the ceiling. The issue: Sometimes, you’re sitting at a table, and the table legs get in the way. So annoying! See Figure 1 to be reminded of this calamity. Fig. 1: The presence of this…
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