Design
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Background: A previous idea (July 19, 2021: worstplans.com/2021/07/19/) was to make stairs safer by specially marking the top and bottom stairs. But why not expand this idea to the entire staircase! The Issue: Surprisingly, falling down stairs is a major source of injury. People are particularly prone to falling down stairs when they’re distracted in…
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Background: Convenience stores occasionally sell hot dogs from a heated glass enclosure with a conveyor belt-like mechanism inside that rotates the hot dogs and moves them closer/farther from a heat lamp (Fig 1). The Issue: Unrelatedly, people often find it hard to get to a comfortable temperature when sleeping at night: it often feels like sleeping…
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Background: A “snail” is a slug-like creature with a shell on its back. Many snails can entirely retreat into their shells for protection, which lead people to describe the snail as “wearing its house on its back.” (This is not strictly accurate, since snails do not pay property tax.) The Issue: High cost of living…
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Background: Certain types of office jobs, such as data entry, are limited by the typing speed of the operator. This is generally acceptable for humans, because human hands are adequate for keyboard typing. The smallest common keyboard has 61 keys (a so-called “60%” keyboard: https://www.google.com/search?q=60%25+keyboard). So the maximum possible human key coverage (Figure 1) is…
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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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