Design
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Background: According to the American Dental Association, the “general” recommendation is for people to brush their teeth for two-ish minutes, twice a day. The Issue: Two minutes is a long time! Maybe there’s some way to motivate people to brush their teeth for this long. Proposal: The incentive is simple: two-minute videos that are only…
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Background: One of the various promises of “augmented reality” (or “AR”) is the ability for a user to wear a virtual reality headset that edits reality in some vaguely useful fashion. For example, a maintenance worker might be able to overlay a diagram of the wiring inside walls, giving them a sort of “x-ray vision.”…
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Background: In the mid-2010s and 2020s, the service “Twitter” was a popular method for celebrities to share short messages with their followers. It had the unusual property of requiring short posts (originally only 140 characters). This was originally due to ancient historical limitations on sending messages (called “SMS”es) over phones, but a slightly-increased limit was…
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Background: Every year, tens of millions of coloring books are sold to children and adults alike. The Issue: Filling in a coloring book can be quite a time-consuming process. Even with frantic scribbling and thick markers, it’s a slow process to fully color even a single page in a coloring book (Figure 1). Proposal: Thanks…
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Background: Supposedly, changing a phone’s display to only show a drab grayscale tends to reduce the amount of time that the phone’s owner spends fiddling around on the Internet. Proposal: Here’s a simple software-only hack that would make people more aware of the amount of time they’re spending on their phones, and might give them…
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Background: There are all manner of weird back-scratching products, like bamboo claws, mini rakes, and probably like, dinosaur teeth or something like that. But all of them require specific effort to use, are generally unwieldy, and are socially frowned upon in a workplace environment. Proposal: The solution is so simple: just integrate the functionality of…
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Background: Generally, the more letters / symbols your alphabet has, the more hassle it is to type on a keyboard. There are ways to mitigate this issue (e.g. Japanese and Chinese manage), but it’s a lot more straightforward if you can just cut down the number of symbols entirely. English, with 26 letters plus a…
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Background: Hundreds of years ago, a cool looking numeric system was invented for writing numbers from 0–9999 in a single cryptic rune: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercian_numerals. In Figure 1, we see how two such symbols could represent a phone number. Proposal: By making use of these strange-looking numbers, ”boring“ mundane activities—like dialing a phone number—can become more exciting…
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Background: Workplaces will occasionally have “countdown clocks,” like “X days without a workplace injury” or “Y days until our product is launched.” The Issue: Sometimes, it’s hard for companies (and employees) to take a long-term view of things—everyone is just focused on the next financial quarter’s profits, or short-term stock value. Proposal: In order to…
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