Design
-
Background: Certain sequences of Unicode characters are displayed as flags. Although most flag emoji are national flags, there are also a few other types, like the European Union flag (🇪🇺), U.S. territory flags (e.g. Puerto Rico: 🇵🇷), and a pirate flag (🏴☠️). The Issue: Although U.S. territories have emoji, states do not! This is a bit of a surprise,…
-
Background: Many types of candy come in pre-wrapped miniature single-serving (or “fun sized”) pieces, especially as Halloween candy. The Issue: For many people, it can be difficult to avoid eating an entire bag / bowl / other-type-of-container of candy. Proposal: We can create a candy dispenser that works as follows: first, the user fills the…
-
Background: When talking to a digital assistant (e.g. Siri, Alexa, Google Home, probably dozens of others), the user can generally speak in a normal human language. For example: “Alexa, play ‘Cool Music for Cool People’.” The Issue: Unfortunately, thee ability to use natural language to communicate with these digital assistants is currently somewhat misleading: they…
-
Background: A “white noise generator” is device that plays a static sound that resembles what you’d hear as a passenger in a car on the highway. This sort of noise is often useful for people who sleep in environments where there is a constant low level of distracting sounds (e.g. frogs making noise, cars stopping…
-
Background: Many people feel obligated to look “sufficiently presentable” when they go out of the house: this may involve non-wrinkled clothes, makeup, hair styling, etc. The Issue: Sometimes, people just want to go about their lives without worrying about fashion or oppressive standards of personal grooming and hygiene. One interesting approach to this is to…
-
Background: From the perspective of a person on the Earth’s surface, the Moon is a more-or-less featureless white circle in the sky. Even with a telescope, what information can a layman glean? Perhaps “here are some craters, and some gray splotches, I guess?” The Issue: The Moon (Fig. 1) might as well be a blank…
-
The Issue: Many laptops have ports on one or both sides: chargers, USB ports, a headphone jack, video out, etc. However, it’s often quite annoying to find the ports. People often forlornly scratch at the side of their laptop for several seconds while trying to attach a cable to an out-of-view port. The difficulty of…
-
Background: Pointing with an outstretched index finger is a common gesture used by humans to direct another human’s attention. The Issue: Since pointing is so widespread, a human being pointed at will usually also recognize the gesture. Depending on the circumstances, pointing may be considered to be rude and accusative. For example, imagine that you…
-
Background: Many workplaces provide coffee makers or espresso machines for their employees to use. The Issue: The process of setting up a drip coffee machine or making an espresso can take several minutes, during which the employee is not toiling productively. Even the single-use-coffee-“pod” machines (famously, the Nespresso brand) take at least a few seconds…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 