Culture
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The issue: When driving long distances, maintaining situational awareness on a boring stretch of road can be difficult. Additionally, distractions such as in-car music may prevent natural audio cues (for example, the sound of nearby cars) from being noticed by the driver. Proposal for the “AudioNav” car navigation aid: By using an array of rangefinders…
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Background: Conference posters are frequently 4 by 6 feet, which means that in the best-case scenario, they will still be four feet long when rolled up. This is still quite cumbersome. Although relatively few individuals are plagued by the difficulty of handling rolled-up posters, their plight has not gone un-noticed. The state of the art:…
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Background: Art galleries are generally arranged by either genre (for example, “portraits” or “landscapes”) or a period in history (e.g. “Renaissance Italy, 1350–1500”). The issue: This traditional organizational scheme results in dozens of similar works in close proximity, which leads to the following problem: after a person has seen ten masterpiece portraits of Venetian nobles,…
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Background: Phone woes: when you use text or call someone, there’s no way to differentiate between the following scenarios: Low priority (not time-sensitive): “Let’s chat, if you have time.” Medium priority (time-sensitive): “I just showed up at the crowded convention center, but I can’t find you.” High priority (important and time-sensitive): “Your car is about to…
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Background: Many product names are ambiguous when used as a keyword in a web search. For example, in the most egregious hypothetical case, if you had a program named “The” it would be almost impossible to do an English-language search for it. Imagine searching for “The problem,” or “The crashing when I load too many…
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As previously discussed on this very site, “gamification” is a hot topic in the world of behavioral influence. The car manufacturer Qoros (观致汽车) (Wikipedia link) is attempting to use this technique in the automotive world. The picture below (from the electronic dashboard of a 2015 Qoros sedan) displays the “Beat the Line” achievement. Unfortunately, a full…
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Background: Old 8-bit video games typically do not adhere to modern standards of occupational safety or handicapped-accessibility. The issue: The issue we will deal with here is making an old game, in this case, Zelda II for the Nintendo Entertainment System, properly compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. Obviously this will be simplified,…
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Background: After washing bedsheets, it is difficult to immediately determine the proper orientation for a non-patterned fitted sheet (the bottommost sheet, with the elastic border, the one that looks like this). Frequently, one turns the sheet 90°, only to discover that the sheet was actually correct the first way. Shameful! Now that we have solved…
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The issue: The fine arts constantly struggle for funding, perhaps due to their general inability to compete with modern sources of entertainment. Proposal: In art museums, commercial sponsorship could take the form of (non-destructive) modification to the works of art themselves. For example, the Mona Lisa could be holding an iPhone (an idea which has…
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Background: As previously discussed, losing weight can be hard, especially when when hunting-and-gathering is reduced to “open fridge, acquire food.” If it were less easy to acquire food, perhaps it would be easier to avoid becoming overweight. Proposal: In this new design for a suburban house, the kitchen is physically separated from the rest of…
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