Design
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Background: Making coffee can involve a number of steps (Figure 1). In an effort to streamline this process, many alternative coffee-making approaches have been devised. Among the “simpler” approaches to making coffee include instant coffee (“just add water”) and the often-ridiculed (yet commercially successful) coffee “pod” system (Figure 2). The coffee pod machine (Figure 3)…
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Background: A car owner may sometimes be ticketed for parking in a location that was valid, but became invalid due to a highly specific restriction (e.g. “street sweeping every 2nd Tuesday, 8–9 AM”). These “rare” restrictions can be hard to remember or notice. Proposal: Thanks to modern omnipresent surveillance infrastructure, a person’s cell phone can now…
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Background: Many programming languages allow extremely long user-defined variable and function names. Frequently, companies will have a specific policy on naming: for example, forbidding abbreviations and requiring descriptive variable names (e.g., “CALCULATE_TOTAL_COMPOUND_INTEREST” would be OK, but “COMPINT” or “CCI” would not). The Issue: Normally, this makes sense: if someone has to read a bunch of…
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Background: Camouflage is used by both humans and animals to hide. This can be to avoid potential sources of danger (e.g., a tiger), to avoid being attacked by a predator (e.g., a tiger), or to hide the individual so that they can observe something (e.g., a tiger) without disturbing it. The Issue: Although tigers are…
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The Issue: People occasionally dye their hair a different color. This process is a bit time-consuming, and it’s not always immediately clear what the results will be. Although it’s possible for a person to edit a digital photo to preview a new hair color, this type of simulation lacks the immersive three-dimensional quality that would…
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Background: A “pill organizer” (Figure 1) is a container for vitamins, medications, or anything else that a person wants to remember to take on a recurring basis. The Issue: There are many other recurring tasks that could also benefit from a weekly organizer. For example, according to the lobbyists at Big Vegetable, everyone should eat…
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The Issue: The book-reading experience has not fundamentally changed in hundreds of years. What if we could “modernize” the experience by bringing the experience of reading articles on the web (Figure 1) to the physical-book form factor? Proposal: The solution is simple: a “normal” book can be enhanced with the normal bonus features of Internet…
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Background: Frequently, a person planning an event (e.g. a party) will have a hard time pinning down the guests as to whether or not they are definitely planning to arrive. This can be annoying for the host: it’s hard to plan an event without knowing how many people will show up! Additionally, most people have…
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Background: Many cities have restrictive zoning requirements that, perhaps justifiably, prevent certain types of construction (for example, building a pesticide manufacturing plant next to an elementary school). Some restrictions are a bit more arbitrary: many “homeowners associations” (HOAs) enforce extremely specific details about the exact shades of beige that a garage door can be painted,…
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The issue: The presence of windows in a house is a major factor in determining of whether a house is dark and cavern-like or bright and uplifting. Unfortunately, it is usually impractical or impossible to add windows to a home after its has been constructed. Additionally, windows generally have a negative effect on climate control:…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 