Category: Feasible inventions

Waiting for the departures board at a railway station to flicker into life shouldn’t, on the face of it, be a stressful experience.

If you happen to be standing at Euston on a bank holiday weekend with about 100 other people (none of whom has a reserved seat for the same 400 mile journey) then the whole process takes on a certain urgency. Suddenly, when the board starts to indicate the crucial platform announcement, there is a very unBritish race to board (a cross between Chariots of Fire and A Night to Remember). Sad.

This problem arises because train companies don’t recognise the difference between commuter trains (where no seats get reserved) and long distance ones, where standing for five or six hours isn’t practical. Existing ticket machines and kiosk personnel don’t deal with seating.

Today’s invention is intended to allow passengers, arriving for a long journey without tickets, to reserve seats when the departure of their choice first appears on the board. This might be made more costly for them than booking everything in advance or via the desk or machine (I’m assuming here that, in the not too distant future, rail companies will have fixed all their broken processes and websites to allow advance seat reservation and ticket purchase to be coordinated…hardly rocket science).

When the electronic board indicates that a particular train is scheduled for departure (perhaps an hour+ in advance), it also shows a phone number (which is different for every departure). People can, as they arrive at the station, text this number to purchase a ticket and and receive a seat reservation.

On boarding the train -calmly, the one-line electronic displays over each seat would say “Reserved for XXXX” -leaving no room for the squabbling which now occurs.

Exactly 20 years ago, somebody bought me a Braun electronic alarm clock that has since become a ‘design classic’. The really cool thing then, back in the days of analogue, was that it was ‘voice controlled’ ie you could get the alarm to stop sounding by shouting ‘Stop’ at it.

So two decades later, I’m sitting in a meeting with several lawyers and businesspeople who have forgotten, as usual, to switch their mobile phones off. They each ring once or twice and, every time, someone has to delve into their expensive, hand-tooled, multipocket brief case to find their phone, press several different buttons and eventually silence them.

Today’s invention is simply to equip mobile phones with enough voice control to allow them to ‘Divert’ to answerphone or just ‘Stop’ making that racket, when instructed to do so verbally.

It seems to me eminently possible to achieve this with the electronics we currently have available. Taking that a step further, it should be feasible, on entering a meeting room, to be able to say ‘Phone standby’ and thus avoid all that inappropriate in-meeting ringing.

Maybe in future, phones could automatically respond on hearing one’s standard meeting-start phrases, such as “Hello, good to meet you…” -thus allowing semi-automatic call diversion.

Ties are sometimes inevitable. There are just some people who need to see one’s neck suitably adorned before your meeting can proceed smoothly.

My ties (a collection in tasteful greys and blues) usually collect a variety of small, contrasting stains until a trip to the dry cleaner is necessitated. I’ve often thought that disposables might be the answer.

Today’s invention is a vending machine for neckties. This would contain a collection of flat, neutrally-coloured kite shaped fabric blanks in a range of colours (these need not be disposable, but might be).

A user could enter their credit card and dial up a combination of base colour and pattern. This would be created using the internal printer and then dispensed through a pair of folding/flattening rollers.

Very useful if your neckwear picks up ink or samples of the menu, this could also be used to create impromptu ties for diners in fancy restaurants or as a smarter alternative to events T shirts eg “Happy 40th to Bill in accounts.”

I’m certain that one of the reasons that people get and stay obese is that we tend to have only limited awareness of what we are eating. Given that the rest of the world encourages diminishing attention spans in general, it’s not surprising that we shove food in, chew, taste briefly and then start reading, chatting, viewing, surfing or whatever. Next thing you know, it’s time for a big dessert.

Well that’s what I realised in my own case. If I find myself eating something and not being aware of enjoying it, I may just choose to either stop doing anything else and pay it attention or discreetly spit it out.

Today’s invention is just one possible way for food to get, and hold, our attention so that we stop unconscious gorging. By being surprised by food with both high calorie and information content, we can eat more healthily.

Imagine a number of delicious chocolate ‘centres’ chosen from a range of different flavours. On a confectionery production line, these high-taste centres would be squirted out next to each other as usual, but in random order. The whole thing could then be enrobed as usual in chocolate.

This would create a bar in which the next taste encountered would be very hard to predict. Each mouthful would be a surprise and so the task of eating it would demand your attention.

You don’t like coffee or hazelnut praline paste? This acts as an extra interruption to the grazing. Spit that section out (somewhere appropriate) and you will realise that the ones you’ve eaten already were actually so tasty, you can save the rest for later. This approach makes eating the satisfying, interesting experience it’s supposed to be.

One of the biggest downsides of public transport (buses, planes, trains and even ships) is that passengers don’t get to see where they are going.

This is a particular worry for people who get travel sick, but it would be cool for everyone if they could look ahead as the driver, pilot or helmsman can. Commuting would thus have some small element of a funfair ride.

So, today’s invention is to attach a camera to the front of these vehicles and project the forward-looking image onto a number of curtains placed at intervals along the inside.

The imagery might have to be scaled down for screens towards the rear -to ensure no mismatch between side views via the windows and the frontal projection.

This would increase the premium of forward-facing seats (which might even be charged for at a higher rate).

I’ve been carrying around a giant book in my briefcase for the last couple of weeks. Sometimes on a journey I get to read some of it but often there simply isn’t enough elbow room to read.

It occurred to me that most people can only read a few pages at a time. Even on a very long trip, I find there’s a limit to my concentration span of about an hour.

Today’s invention is an upgrade to the age-old process of bookbinding -at least until electronic books become widely available.

Modular (printed) books can save weight on journeys (Charles Dickens’ stories were written to be read as installments). My proposal is to make available books (via eg download from Amazon) on a chapter by chapter basis -at a pro rata price.

These could be printed out, clipped together, read in transit and then ringbound together, back at base.

This would provide portability and cost-effective access to useful subsets of a publication (albeit perhaps only chapter 1 of a novel), without having to fork out for the whole thing.

Such a scheme could be improved upon by progressive printing: the first print uses very light ink of one colour,the next edition would be printed over the same page, using dark ink of contrasting colour -it’s surprisingly easy to read the latest version and thus save a lot of paper (keeping only the electronic version).

I was looking at a Skoda the other day and thinking what a high quality vehicle they had created (for the price).

The only thing which deters many buyers, I suspect, is the badge. I don’t just mean that the marque is regarded with suspicion by serious car buyers, although that may be true. I actually mean that the physical badge they have designed to symbolise their product looks like a green ink stain made by an unsupervised four year old.

The badge itself looks ugly and offputting.So, rather than attempt to argue the point with the board of VW Audi Group, or whoever owns them this week, it occurred to me that there might be a better way.

Today’s invention is an online tool which allows each individual car buyer to design their own badges for their new car. These are intended to replace a manufacturer’s badges completely and overcome any stigma associated with them. The resulting designs could be made via desktop manufacturing machinery and mailed to the owner to be press-fitted and/or glued over the originals, perhaps.

Having my own badge on a new car would certainly allow me to consider buying a range of vehicles which, at the moment, are defaced by carrying ugly, silly versions eg Subaru, Daewoo, Lexus and Mazda, to name but a few.

You can buy a range of pet feeders for when you go on holiday. Each day, a new compartment springs open and gives your furry friend access to a regulated amount of dehydrated chicken-liver particles with added fibro-yum.

Today’s invention is a lunchbox version of this for humans who, like me, feel healthier if we eat a number of smaller meals throughout the day but who have a tendency to scoff the lot at around 09:35 every morning if they are all in the same container.

The lunchbox would simply consist of a number of separately locked compartments, each with a different timer. Once the opening time on each was set, these could not be altered until after they had sprung open at the appointed moment.

This would force people to wait for their next snack until they were actually feeling hungry and help reinforce healthier, more personalised, eating patterns.

Mobile service providers don’t really need any clever techniques to encourage the use of their services. There is, nonetheless, a certain amount of interest in providing people with mobile, collaborative, socialisation games. Today’s invention is a new approach.

A group of people register their mobile numbers. When they meet at a designated time, probably in the pub, they all receive a picture message (which might even autodelete after a short time).

Each picture is a different fragment of a larger image. The original has been automatically ‘cut’ into the number of pieces corresponding to the friends in a group. This image might be a message or an image of a landmark. The point is that it’s only retrievable if nearly all the group members are present and if they can work out a way to quickly arrange their mobile screens in order to make the message visible. There is therefore a strong incentive for everyone in a group to turn up and play what amounts to an updated version of ‘twister’.

This might even be used by people in a corporate team building context or by unacquainted patrons of a singles bar.

Once the message has been deciphered, the group could follow instructions in order to win a prize or race against another group receiving the same message. A game might consist of a sequence of such messages with a sizeable prize at the end.

Dripping taps make me mad: both because of their incessant noise and because of the difficulty of cracking open the tap mechanism to fit 5p-worth of replacement rubber washer. Then you strip some threads and it becomes a £200 plumber call-out (cheaper just to sue the tap manufacturer).

When you repeatedly squeeze a rubber washer (especially one in contact with a flow of warm water) it gradually becomes less elastic. This means that people are encouraged to turn the tap further to achieve a seal. Keep this process up and eventually they will graunch an almost inelastic washer between two hard surfaces -and the tap will no longer form a seal. The result will be an incessant drip that you can’t avoid hearing two floors away.

Today’s invention is a mechanical hard stop which prevents a tap being turned closed so far that the washer is compressed more than required to make a seal. It could be supplied as a simple bolt-on attachment to existing taps (although making it aesthetically pleasing might be a challenge).

This would limit the damage that occurs to washers in this context and prolong their working life. The only downside would be that once a leak does eventually begin (due to degradation of the washer material over time, rather than over-compression) there is no way to just close the tap a bit harder using the absurd mechanical advantage most tap designs provide. It’s then simply time to fit a new washer.