Design
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The Issue: Commuters often spend an hour or more in traffic every day. There are many chores in life that would be nice to handle in this hour, but it’s hard to (say) visit an optometrist while you’re in a car. Proposal: Until now, that is! This proposal is so simple, you’ll wonder why it…
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The Issue: It can be difficult to get motivated to read a textbook or dry historical tome. It’s much easier to read an action-filled story that features murder and intrigue! Proposal: In order to motivate a person to read a boring textbook, we will create a new kind of “hybrid” book: instead of printing a…
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The Issue: Climbing the world’s tallest mountain peaks can be hazardous for several reasons: a person could be blown off the mountain by gale-force winds, get frozen, or die due to insufficient oxygen in the low-atmospheric-pressure “death zone”—and this is before even considering the danger from disease, avalanches, other humans, and high-altitude cryptids such as…
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Background: Two obvious qualities that contribute to making an alphabet “good”: It’s quick to write. The letters can be distinguished unambiguously. (Information density might also be worth considering—we don’t want the letters to take up too much space—but we’ll be ignoring it here.) Sometimes, speed-of-writing and ease-of-reading is a tradeoff: consider the shorthand shown in…
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Background: Skylights (or light pipes) are a great way to get natural sunlight indoors. Unfortunately, installation is moderately complicated and is infeasible for renters and high-rise dwellers. Also, skylights only provide light during the daytime (unsurprisingly). Proposal: Thanks to LED lighting, it is possible to create a convincing “artificial skylight” (Figure 1) for 50 American…
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The Issue: Vacuuming a house can be an annoying chore. Robots exist (famously, the Roomba) that will vacuum a floor, but they have many limitations and can’t handle certain common locations, like carpeted stairs. Proposal: What is needed is a vacuum cleaner that can go anywhere that gets foot traffic. And what better way to…
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The Issue: It’s frequently the case that a person has an insufficient number of hands to perform a particular task. Specifically, a person carrying two objects (Figure 1) might temporarily need an extra hand to operate a door handle / press a button / etc. As shown above, solutions to this problem are inelegant at…
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The Issue: When eating, sometimes the most appealing thing to do is to immediately wolf down all the food in front of you. People then occasionally regret this overeating, and wish there were some way to more easily exercise self control despite the presence of delicious food. Proposal: We can solve this wolfing-down of food…
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The issue: Frequently, people buy exercise equipment but then don’t actually use it. Instead, barbells gather dust and exercise bikes are used as a supplementary clothing racks. Proposal: One effective way of encouraging a person to use their exercise equipment is to have the equipment physically block access to the owner’s bed (Figure 1). This…
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Background: In some video games, there is a difficulty setting referred to as “ironman,” in which a player only has one life—if they die, they must replay the ENTIRE game over again. (This is also the default setting in the “roguelike” game genre.) Proposal: In books, unfortunately there is no equivalent to this “ironman” mode—until…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 