Just
A few years ago, I took the Bart from Mission to to Embarcadero every morning. The image above shows what it felt like. Squashed between morning commuters, I came up with a fix. Note how people tend to flock around the doors. The rest of the train is completely empty. What if instead it could look like this? That's a conveyor belt. It takes up half of the train's width, and is perfectly timed with the train's current progress on the current line. The destination stations are marked on the c
A heavy-duty photocopier that also cleans the floors
When making copies mobs the floors
A direct-to-machine Nespresso delivery system
Coffee capsules could flow like a public utility, and we don't have to deploy pipes under the streets.
In 2020, a self-typing keyboard is easier to make than a regular keyboard
Autocomplete is great for completing words, but what if it could complete full sentences?
A single-language translator
There are hundreds of languages inside any language, but no apps to translate between them
A slide deck that creates itself as you're speaking
What if slides are just subtitles for your presentation, and what if those subtitles weren't just sentences?
This ad is about you
An app that makes tv ads for one single person – using GPT-3, stock video, stock music, and a text-to-speech API
A book about sketching for app design
You don't have to learn drawing to sketch digital products
A phone with built-in earplugs
Don't have a watch with built-in earplugs? Don't worry. Here's the phone with built-in earplugs.
4 times faster at the same fuel cost
Arrive exponentially faster by driving on the roofs on other cars on long stretches of a highway
A podcast player that doesn’t feel like a hacked music player
Podcast players are flying cars that should be planes. Here's what a podcast plane could look like
Bump iPhone on Sonos to play
Handing over music from a phone to a speaker shouldn't be more work than putting your phone down on a table.
Textato: A word processor that doesn't think it's a typewriter
Most text editors still think the end goal is a piece of paper, and not the web.
A whiteboard robot
Capturing, sharing and erasing a whiteboard should be a single, robotic action
An eye tracker that doesn't need humans
Millions of years of human eye evolution and 39 people aged 18-50 years old, who thought they were doing one experiment, when they really were doing another. All in one small Mac app.
A self-driving mailbox
To mail something, you come to the mailbox. What if it came to you?
An anywhere-calculator
This app lets you calculate anything just by selecting with your mouse
A mobile browser for desktop
I made a compact power-saving browser. But that's not how it started.
Augmenting the user’s skills, not just their reality
Breaking the rules of AR in five demos, accidentally scaring people on the internet — code included
AR-ready furniture
When we see the world through glasses, all we need is tracking patterns. Everywhere.
Remote control instructions in AR
This app shows a pre-made layer of instructions on top of a remote control. Anyone who's ever helped their mom using the remote control knows how hard it is. With augmented reality, we can layer anything on top of the real world, including stuff that helps moms using stuff. The layer could be animated, it could be live, or pre-recorded, or supplied by the manufacturer—or all of it, and even tailored for one specific person. A similar approach could also change the appearance of the remote co
Kitchen timers in AR
What if you had a million free kitchen timers that never ran out of battery, and disappeared when you didn't need them?
An app that gives you instant drawing skills
Trace the lines of any drawing in any size on any surface in AR
An app that replies to your texts
Text messages are driving our lives, and we're on the back seat frantically trying to reply before the next one comes in.
A voice speaker for train stations
You hear a lot of train station announcements that are not relevant for you. With voice speakers for train stations, all announcements are relevant for you
A bike path that cuts through a mall
Once you see this bike patb from above you'll notice what's wrong with it. It’s a beautiful bike path, elevated, crooked, brightly colored. But it’s not the direct path, it’s not the desire path. This, on the other hand, is a desire path. Here’s more [https://99percentinvisible.org/article/least-resistance-desire-paths-can-lead-better-design/] . Back to the bike path. For the beautiful path in Copenhagen, not being directly on the desire path doesn’t matter in the sunny pictures, racking in a
A GPS bag pack that steers its human
Ideally, you’d know when to turn, even when you don’t. When you do, you shift your balance slightly, which in turn makes your left foot take a shorter step than the right one, successfully changing the general direction. If navigating a grid of streets can be reduced to a mere balancing act, does it matter if that shift of balance comes from your brain — or from your bagpack? After a just a few weeks of use, the thinking and knowing and anticipating of the balance bag and its novelty and excit
An airport that loads passengers like human cargo
How to speed up airplane boarding by at least 10 times.
A self-driving office chair
Unlike their reputation, the office worker gets up and moves around a lot. The office worker waits as the coffee machine is brewing, they meet someone and talk for a while, they go to meetings, they hunt down conference rooms in previously unexplored territories. They get lost, and they get tired, and they get bored, and they often forget their laptops on various surfaces where they had to leave it in order to free up both hands.
A brainstorming facility with lots of dirty dishes
The worst place for ideas is a conference room. The best place is a conference room with dirty dishes.
An immersive VR game that navigates you to a real place
Navigation doesn't have to be difficult and boring.
A projector drone that follows its user
You can't have a tv on all your walls. Or can you?
A Donald Trump Keyboard
You most likely don’t agree with the Donald, but when it comes to writing emails, we all have a thing or two to learn from him. That’s where the Trump keyboard for iPhone comes in.
A chat bot took my money and left me in Mexico City
Here’s the bot’s own story and what it learned
Your UI is your product’s humble compensation for not being telepathic
Take a few products and keep asking “what is this compensating for?” and you’ll eventually end up with the same answer. And that answer may be why conversational interfaces could get in trouble
A fast-food restaurant with exit treadmills
Here's how to eat what you want and gain what you want
I doomed mankind with a free text editor
Will long and complex words make you look smarter? Meet the people who think that short words will make us dumb
How I hated code and decided to spend an hour writing it every day for a year
How to hack yourself to enjoy learning to code
We're not done with you, stopwatch app
A stopwatch uses the clock, but what if it also used all the other sensors?
A drive-behind movie theater
When our cars drive themselves we'll be bored behind the missing wheel
A self-driving hot dog stand
With no hands needed on the self-driving wheel, we can now do what we do best: eat
Friends don't let friends listen to music alone
Streaming your Spotify to any number of friends and strangers, legally
Making screenshots and screen recordings of Android phones
Screenshots of phones should be as easy as taking a picture on a phone
A when-can-I-be-home watch
It almost never matters what time it is. It's about what it means instead.
A self-driving recreational vehicle
A car that becomes a natural extension of your house - when you're home
Buying an ebook with a physical book
The only thing better than buying a physical book is reading it digitally. Here's how to have both.
An app that makes your phone worse as you gain weight
Losing weight is hard for most of us, but so is losing our phone.
A wall clock with an extra set of hands
A mechanical clock that shows the real time next to the current
Seeing how long it takes to read a book with a paper clip and a browser extension
Ebooks are great, but they're hard to judge by the cover - and thickness
How to teleport a printer across the Atlantic
This fictional company would allow you to send anything, of any size, to any big city — for free, and at 50 times less the pollution
How a remote control with just one button could make your TV great again
Yes, just one, big, nice button. The manual would say one thing: “Press the button”. Here’s how it could work.
Using the phone as a highlighter pen
Moving text from the real world into the digital world
A parked car projector
Everything about parked cars is boring: finding a spot. Paying for it. Walking past parked cars. If you install a free parked car projector, it will display street art by local artists, sometimes even live, as they create it. And the occasional location-aware ad, like this one. You also park for free, in a designated projector parking spot.
A camera that lets you do stuff without lifting your finger
Smartphone cameras are fast. Until you want to do something with the photos.
Nutrition Facts for printers
It's too easy to buy something that is hard to use. The food industry has a solution.
An app that talks to robots on the phone
Companies install robots to talk to customers. What if customers installed robots to talk to companies?
What I need from a shop’s website
It's not surveys, cookie warnings, discounts, or gift inspiration
A URL to replace phone numbers
How is an arbitrary 8+ digit number the best way to get in touch?
A self-building reading list
When you find something you want to read, watch or listen to later, what do you do? Some of it goes into Pocket or Instapaper, some of it on a Youtube watch list, and some of it becomes a bookmark on Twitter. What if you could build a master reading list based on what you bookmark across all the sites you use? With Ian [https://twitter.com/ianjorgensen]
Finding out which things to throw out
Here's what you can safely throw out and not regret it later
A food search engine running on Evernote
Quick. Where can you get ravioli for takeaway? You'd probably have to spend a few minutes enumerating the Italian restaurants in your neighborhood. But what if there was a search engine for this? We scanned as many menus as we could find, then saved them in Evernote, and used their API to let anyone search those notes and see the menus. With Kenneth [https://twitter.com/auchenberg]
A wireframe kit for Google Drawings and 5 reasons it beats Omnigraffle and Visio
Google Drawings is one of the best wireframing tools out there, but no one is using it
Why designers should be on a button budget
It's free to add a button in an app. It shouldn't be.
A music review site you can pivot like a spreadsheet
It's funny how music review sites often just have one, single view of their reviews: a list. And it's funny how we just have come to accept that. This aggregator lets you pivot on Rating, Genre, Album, Label and Publication.
The worn interface
In the real world, we can se traces of how other people use things around us. Here's why we should be able to do that in software, too.
Perfect festival day finder
It's a 3-day festival. You can only go for 1. But which one? What if you could just enter your last.fm username on a web page and let it do the math?
Personal paper-based festival plan
A music festival with 100 gigs can be overwhelming. Add hangovers and sleep deprivation, and the task of picking out a gig becomes unmanageable, and you're left to chance. To top it off, your phone ran out of battery two days ago. What if someone who knows your taste better than yourself could make you a nice, printable, foldable, offline program you can carry in your back pocket? With Claus [https://twitter.com/claus]
What if radio stations were people, too?
I signed up Denmark's biggest music radio station to last.fm, hoping to uncover the truth
What would reality do?
I like to think of software as a person in a service conversation with the user. The user would be a teenage girl ordering concert tickets or a hung over dad figuring out how to turn on his phone. But the software would always be a professional. Even better, the software acts and makes decisions as if it were among the world’s best in what it is doing. Why shouldn’t it? As interaction designers, we spend hours preparing for a simple five minute conversation. One way to apply this could be imagi
An alarm clock that shows you that other people are awake
Know the feeling when you wake up, and it is pitch black outside, and you think it's a mistake? The clock says 7am, but honestly, it could be wrong, right? I hacked a Chumby [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby] to show me a live webcam feed from a camera pointing out the window to the street. That would be proof that it is indeed morning, and other people are responsible adults with their jackets on already. At night, it shows a feed from the airport with the planes landing and taxiing to
Reading while running
Let's just be honest: running can be boring. Running on a treadmill is always boring. So I made a feed reader for people on treadmills. You start it and it automatically scrolls as you're running.
Uber for tech support
It's a well-established fact in the universe that there's a lot of moms out there needing help with their computer. It's also a fact that their kids are not always around the corner. But someone is. Could we fully automate tech support for moms? A mom would call our automated phone number, which would prompt her for her postal code, then send out text messages to our army of tech supporters. The first to answer the message gets the mom's phone number—and a customer. Did it work? Surprisin
Movie showtimes, but more like tv schedules
We all know how to use movie showtime listings. There's a movie you want to watch, so you look up when and where it's showing. But what if you have a favorite theater? What if you want to go right now? What if you want to go in the afternoon? Bifn.dk was like a pivot table for movie showtimes. It would order today's screenings based on time, movie or theater.
Fake music opinions
Sometimes you just need an opinion about the indie band du jour. Wouldn't it be handy if you could enter a band name and get a hipster attitude on demand? The project used Last.fm's API to extract similar band names, and then layered an opinion on top of it. I did manage to have some weird conversations using it.
Bringing social networks into real life
If you think about your life, your partner, your friends, your job, the place your live. How many of those happened more or less randomly, bumping into the right person at the right time and place? To me, it's almost all of it. Self-help gurus will tell you to prepare your self for luck, then you will be lucky. So how do you do that? Imagine a world where you walk into a room and instantly know who everyone is, who your common friends are, what interests you share? This world already exist
A welcome-home-robot
Noticed how you do the same things every single time you enter your home? How automating that failed miserably and I woke up myself and my neighbors at 3am
Danish street language transformer
Let's be honest. News can be boring. Slang never is. What if the news was written in slang? Here's how a viral service got me reported to the police - several times.
Big data game: Relate-a-zon
Ever noticed the "people who bought this item also bought..." section on Amazon? Often, it's like mind reading. There are obviously related products, and not so obviously related ones.