Design
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Background: People generally enjoy having a good view from their home or office windows. However, some locations have a bad view (e.g. a dark alley or cement wall) or cannot accommodate windows at all (e.g. interior offices or basements). Proposal: Modern flatscreen displays can be as large as office windows (and some types consume very…
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Background: “Lost cat” and “lost dog” signs are often placed up on telephone poles (Fig. 1), but it’s unlikely that a specific person who sees a lost pet will also have seen the sign (or even know that the pet is actually lost in the first place). Proposal: In order to add more people…
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Background: Many companies issue ID badges to their employees. Sometimes these come in multiple forms: one type of badge for permanent workers, and a different color for temporary employees. Proposal: In order make the time-limited nature of temporary employees more clear—and perhaps to remind the temporary employee to start applying for jobs again—a low-power timer…
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Background: Rail-based transportation has an inescapable problem: in a single-track situation, there is no way for a train to pull over and let another train pass. The issue: Thus, a single stopped train can block an entire track indefinitely. And a slow train can’t be overtaken by an express train. This can be solved by…
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Background: When baking a pizza in an oven, it’s it’s easy to remove the pizza from the oven and instantly start devouring it. The issue: Unfortunately, molten cheese (Fig. 1) cannot coexist with human tissue, so this causes severe burns to the impatient pizza-eater. Proposal: We can prevent further occurrences of this culinary tragedy by…
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Background: When giving a presentation to a diverse audience (e.g. of experts and non-experts, or of employees from two different departments in a company), you have a problem: you can only make one set of slides, but sometimes you might want to tailor different parts of the presentation to a different audience. For example, one…
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Background: Moderating the comments section of any web site is a thankless and un-ending task. But what if there were some way to make it slightly easier? Proposal: Instead of just allowing any comments, we can require that comments be totally unique and never-before-seen. Once a comment is made, or an image is posted, a…
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Background: Print news has unfortunately been dealt a mortal blow by a combination of the Internet and mobile phones. But there’s still one way to take advantage of the physical nature of printed news—a way that cannot be replicated by news on a phone! Proposal: We can bring printed newspapers and promote a healthy lifestyle…
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Background: In the United States, an employed person has two conflicting goals: To commute to their job as fast as possible (ideally by “hyperloop” or helicopter), …and to live as far away from their workplace as possible. To these ends, thousands of man-hours have gone into new legislation preventing residences near places of employment (zoning…
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Background: Part 1: As Internet speeds have increased, web sites have become more and more enormous (Example: Figure 1). Part 2: Additionally, people have become more and more accustomed to impulsively wasting time on the Internet. The issue: Here are the two problems that we can solve simultaneously: Enormous web pages are slow to…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 