Design
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Background: Every year, a large number of children accidentally poison themselves by drinking household chemicals. Cleaning products and pesticides (Figure 1) represent the cause of ~15% of poisoning cases in children under the age of 6, according to the National Capital Poison Center. The issue: To a child who is illiterate and unfamiliar with conventional…
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The issue: Using your phone to read the news has three major downsides: You have to hold your phone. You could easily drop it! It uses battery life, which might be in short supply depending on how often you can charge your phone. A barrage of linked “clickbait” articles (with interesting photos) attempt to lure…
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Background: Sometimes, you want to drink a beverage, but it’s too hot. The issue: You could just wait for it to cool off naturally, but who has time for that! And if you were drinking from an insulated thermos, this cooling-off process could take hours. Proposal: The basic idea is simple: an ultra-long curly straw…
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Background: Some cars have a “remote start” feature to start a car before you actually get inside. This feature is typically used in regions with extremely cold weather. The issue: Some people like to entirely turn off their laptops when traveling or over a weekend. But then they have to wait a couple of minutes…
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The issue: One ever-present hazard for bicyclists is the possibility of being “doored”—hit by a suddenly-opened driver’s side door of a parked car. A similar issue confounds carpool passengers: when exiting a full vehicle, the driver’s-side passenger must open the door directly into traffic (since they cannot exit on the curb side). This presents the…
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The issue: Using a cell phone outdoors can present two main problems, as shown in Figure 1. Specifically, you may be far from a tower (and thus, get poor reception) and the harsh light of the noon sun may make it very difficult to read the text on your phone, especially with the recently-popularized “dark…
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Background: Online communities often have rivalries with one another, especially if the topics that they cover are extremely similar. For example, one could imagine a vicious feud between two different communities of saltwater aquarium enthusiasts. Proposal: Maybe we can harness and direct this mean-spiritedness in an interesting way that will, if nothing else, at least…
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Background: When you receive a message on a phone, usually the phone vibrates or makes an alert sound. The issue: If someone sends several short messages in a row (e.g. “Here is the restaurant:” “(link to restaurant address)” “We’ll be there at 7 pm.”) or if a conversation has several participants, your phone will be…
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The issue: Dental floss has a serious problem with unnecessary waste: each length of dental floss has a “dead zone” at the ends that is used to wrap around fingers. This unused region is thrown away without ever having been actually used as dental floss (Figure 1). Proposal: Instead of wrapping the dental floss around…
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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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