Communication
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Background: Online discussion forums often have posts that look like this: Air pollution actually SAVES 10,000 lives per day worldwide >109 Comments [Upvote] [Downvote] [View Comments] Or: Futuristic economic model allows Swedes to make $200,000 a year without having jobs >274 Comments [Upvote] [Downvote] [View Comments] The issue: Crucially, the comment page is usually completely…
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Background: Sometimes, someone will send out a company-wide email that is CCed to everyone else at the company. The issue: Anyone who sends a “reply all” response to that initial email will generate another company-wide email. After a while, people will start getting annoyed by the constant irrelevant emails and will request that people stop…
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The issue: Sometimes, a representative for a company causes a public relations disaster by saying something dumb on camera (Figure 1). Obviously, we’d like to avoid this. But although it’s easy to avoid interview disasters over email (just have a PR department filter the outgoing emails), this doesn’t work for real-time in-person interactions. Proposal: Fortunately,…
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The issue: During a conference call, it can be difficult to position multiple people in such a way that everyone is actually in-frame. Usually, either: Only one person fits into the frame, or: Everyone is extremely far from the camera, so 95% of the screen area is taken up by a conference table. Figure 1…
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The issue: Sometimes, one must make a difficult decision in life, or convey bad news to someone. This can be stressful! Proposal: But what if these hard decisions could be outsourced? With this new system, if you find yourself in an unpleasant situation while messaging someone, you can press a button on the program to…
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Erase all of written history to hide our shameful alphabet-based mistakes from the future! After reading this, you will think Fahrenheit 451 is an instruction manual.
also that X-is-an-instruction-manual is already a joke about 1984, ambiguity, ambiguous letters, Celcius 233, Centipede 233, Centrigrade 233, erase the mistakes of the past, Fahrenheit 451, fix Latin letters, fix the English language, letters, never learn from the past, that one movie Equilibrium I guess
The issue: Latin-based writing systems—like the one your’e reading right now—have a serious problem: many letters and numbers look exactly the same! The most obvious example (Figure 1) is probably “l” (lower-case “L”) and “I” (upper-case “i”). Benefits: Fixing these duplicated symbols, perhaps with the proposed new symbols in Figure 3, has a number of…
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Background: Remember when privacy was a thing? No? Oh, ok then. But people used to have some concern about having their location and whereabouts monitored by companies and governments. I guess this information was used for evil-doing at least once in history? Whatever, who cares, let’s gather data and make an app! The issue: Have…
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The issue: Sometimes, it’s hard to keep in touch with your friends and family, especially if you live in different cities and time zones. Proposal: The solution is quite simple—an app that keeps track of when you last met up with, texted, called, or otherwise contacted your friends and family. In fact, it could even…
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The issue: Sometimes, you’re looking for a co-worker, and you’d like to know if they’ve gone out to lunch, left for the day already, or haven’t arrived yet. Normally, you’d have to actually send a text message to that person to ask. But that can be overly intrusive. Fig. 1: Your coworker’s chair is empty.…
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