Culture
-
Background: You’ve probably heard of a “washer-dryer” combination, an existing one-stop-shop appliance for cleaning clothes. What if we extended this philosophy to other categories of home appliances? Proposal: Sometimes, a frozen food requires a lengthy defrosting period. So if you want to eat that item, you must laboriously: Remove the item from the freezer Place…
-
Background: Supposedly, the proliferation of ubiquitous GPS has lead to humans being worse at navigating, the presence of calculators has rendered most people incapable of doing even basic mental math, and the existence of written language has made humans worse at remembering things more generally. Proposal: In order to combat this “things are too easy”…
-
The issue: It’s difficult to fully appreciate certain types of art from just a photo, especially large pieces or three-dimensional works like statues. For example: Picasso’s Guernica (11 feet high, 25 feet wide) Michelangelo’s David (17 feet tall) The Sistine Chapel ceiling The Cave of Hands Unfortunately, these famous works are spread throughout the world,…
-
Background: Many web sites require a user to agree to a long and incomprehensible “terms of service” before they can use the site. Since these contracts are dozens (or hundreds) of pages, everyone just scrolls to the end and clicks “AGREE.” (See two examples in Figure 1). While you’d think that a company could slip…
-
Background: Essentially all major programming languages exclusively use keywords written in English. (For a couple of exceptions, see the addendum at the end.) But this doesn’t have to be the case! Proposal: By using symbols instead of words, we can convey a concept both more concisely and more easily across languages. See below for a…
-
Background: Columns of text in a book or newspaper are generally formatted in the fully justified style (Figure 1), where the text always lines up exactly on both the left and right edges. Fig. 1: The “justify text” button (circled in red) can be found in nearly every text editor. The issue: Justified text works…
-
Background: Early 3D games used a relatively small number of polygons to create a blocky “low-poly” approximation of a game environment. Three styles that occasionally come close to the low-poly look are: Mid-Century Modern Scandinavian design (e.g. IKEA) Brutalism But none of these styles are specifically aiming to minimize the number of visible surfaces in…
-
Background: The humble door-locking deadbolt has suffered from a severe failure of innovation and imagination in the last 100 years. Specifically: most deadbolts have exactly two positions (Figure 1): Open (door can be opened from either side) Closed (door requires a key to open from the outside or a switch to be operated from the…
-
Background: Exercise routines are often extremely dry and boring. But they can be made more engaging by making a “themed” workout, with each part of a workout helping to accomplish an imaginary goal. This is not a totally new idea. For example, the game “Zombies Run” motivates a person to jog faster by providing a…
-
Background: The stop sign, for all its utilitarian simplicity, has a severe and critical shortcoming: it has two different roles, both marked by the same sign (Figure 1). The two situations, and what the driver must do in each case: All-way stop: driver can casually check for other cars right there at the intersection, and…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 
You must be logged in to post a comment.