UI / UX
User interfaces and “user experience” ideas.
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The Issue: It can be difficult to get motivated to read a textbook or dry historical tome. It’s much easier to read an action-filled story that features murder and intrigue! Proposal: In order to motivate a person to read a boring textbook, we will create a new kind of “hybrid” book: instead of printing a…
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Background: Two obvious qualities that contribute to making an alphabet “good”: It’s quick to write. The letters can be distinguished unambiguously. (Information density might also be worth considering—we don’t want the letters to take up too much space—but we’ll be ignoring it here.) Sometimes, speed-of-writing and ease-of-reading is a tradeoff: consider the shorthand shown in…
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The Issue: Vacuuming a house can be an annoying chore. Robots exist (famously, the Roomba) that will vacuum a floor, but they have many limitations and can’t handle certain common locations, like carpeted stairs. Proposal: What is needed is a vacuum cleaner that can go anywhere that gets foot traffic. And what better way to…
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The Issue: It’s frequently the case that a person has an insufficient number of hands to perform a particular task. Specifically, a person carrying two objects (Figure 1) might temporarily need an extra hand to operate a door handle / press a button / etc. As shown above, solutions to this problem are inelegant at…
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The Issue: When eating, sometimes the most appealing thing to do is to immediately wolf down all the food in front of you. People then occasionally regret this overeating, and wish there were some way to more easily exercise self control despite the presence of delicious food. Proposal: We can solve this wolfing-down of food…
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The issue: Frequently, people buy exercise equipment but then don’t actually use it. Instead, barbells gather dust and exercise bikes are used as a supplementary clothing racks. Proposal: One effective way of encouraging a person to use their exercise equipment is to have the equipment physically block access to the owner’s bed (Figure 1). This…
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Background: In some video games, there is a difficulty setting referred to as “ironman,” in which a player only has one life—if they die, they must replay the ENTIRE game over again. (This is also the default setting in the “roguelike” game genre.) Proposal: In books, unfortunately there is no equivalent to this “ironman” mode—until…
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Background: In many video games, the process of doling out upgrades to the player is represented in the form of a “skill tree,” where different branches indicate different fields of expertise (e.g. a branch for sword-fighting and a separate one for horseshoe-making). Proposal: Maybe this same idea can be applied to education! See Figure 1…
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Background: There is an idiomatic expression, “like a hot knife through butter,” indicating something that is extremely easy to do. The issue: Yet, somehow when people make toast, they frequently use a COLD knife (or at least, a room temperature one) to cut a piece of butter. This is particularly troublesome if butter is stored…
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Background: A substantial amount of food that is produced is wasted at the consumer (household) level. Additionally, if you’re reading this text in English in the middle of the 21st century, it’s statistically likely that you, the reader, are not highly concerned with famine as a day-to-day hazard. Proposal: Ideally, we would like to both…
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