Design
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Background: Do you own a crowded coffee shop? No? Well, you should remedy that, and then read on! The issue: In large cities, coffee shops are often entirely occupied by people doing work on their laptops. Coffee shops have come up with various strategies for dealing with the pros and cons of being a low-cost…
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Background: Remember when privacy was a thing? No? Oh, ok then. But people used to have some concern about having their location and whereabouts monitored by companies and governments. I guess this information was used for evil-doing at least once in history? Whatever, who cares, let’s gather data and make an app! The issue: Have…
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Background: Many years ago, only the elite members of society were literate. In some places, it was even ILLEGAL for commoners / peasants / slaves to be literate, for example: 1500s Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Opposition 1800s America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_the_United_States Proposal: Now that we are allegedly in a more enlightened era, there is no way to use the alphabet…
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Background: A “three-way light switch” (i.e. two switches that control the same light) is useful when there are multiple places that need to control a single light, such as at both the top and the bottom of a staircase. The issue: Unfortunately, three-way switches are often out of sync with the actual state of the…
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The issue: Both humans and automated vacuum cleaners (e.g. Roombas) find it inconvenient to operate a vacuum cleaner around furniture—specifically, no one wants to move extremely heavy furniture just to vacuum around the legs. Proposal: Most furniture is still stable even when not all supporting legs are contacting the ground. So why not have telescoping…
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Background: In the past, you could tell what a computer was doing (to some extent) just by listening to it. Disk access would be accompanied by a classic floppy disk sound (or the “click” of a hard drive) The fan would spin up if the CPU was under high load. You could actually listen to network…
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Background: Every US state has a flag. But only a few states have an icon—something immediately recognizable (and ideally, easily drawn and memorable). For an example of icons, we can look at Japan’s provinces (or “prefectures”), nearly all of which are represented by a distinctive single-color icon (Figure 1). Proposal: The proposal is as follows:…
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Background: A lot of kitchen tools have a non-electric version that is hand-cranked: for example, a coffee grinder, ice-cream maker, mixer, or salad-spinner. Additional common hand-powered items include the can opener and pepper mill. The issue: Unfortunately, many of these tools are slow and inefficient to operate by hand. However, if there were some way…
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Background: Slide presentations are now a main ingredient in almost all lectures and presentations (Figure 1). The issue: Computers have made slide presentations extremely easy to make (example in Figure 2), but haven’t helped with one issue: presentations often go on FAR TOO LONG. For example, none of these ideas for promoting short presentations…
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