HCI Research Ideas

Idea 1

Portable Dyson Spheres: creating a bubble of perpetual energy generation around the earth.

• Portable Dyson Spheres: creating a bubble of perpetual energy generation around the earth.
• Brain-computer interfaces for animals: allowing pet owners to have a deeper connect with their companions
• Peer reinforcement treatment for people with ADHD: can robots do a better job?
• Personal Robots: exploring a life where personal robots are coexisting with humans and helping in everyday tasks
• Modern Signage: how do we take something as simple as signage to the modern age
• Continuing where Swartz left off: free information for everyone
• Leveraging randomness for cryptography
• How can humans be more reliant on each other?
• Generating code art through movement and randomness of everyday life
• Can we catalogue and access memories physically?
• Ambient computing: automatically adjusting your life based on your feelings and body/ brain signals
• Invisible Interfaces: what do interfaces look like without tangible interfaces? Humane Pin is a great example
• Ubiquitous Information: storing and retrieving information at will
• What is the Technology 2.0?
• AI Companionship: ethics, safety and society
• What do we call AI interacting with AI?
• How do we turn imagination to reality?
• Create tangible outputs out of non-tangible actions?
• What makes us, us? Exploring the human condition through experiments in design and technology
• What is the future of money? Inspired by Ubik by P. K. Dick
• Humane Artificial Intelligence
• Social Computing: navigating the webs of society. Can it help better define social function of each human being?
• Dreams: can they be useful tools to augment our memories?
• Human memory: tangible loci for rapid information retrieval
• What does life look like for Humans 2.0?
• Generative environment: can our surroundings adapt based on our needs?
• Hacking culture: how do we change culture?
• What if jobs didn’t exist?
• What if everyone got free money?
• What if everyone ruled the world equally?
• Digital Safety for Children
• Digital Wellbeing for Children
• Urban mobility: future of personal travel in urban jungles
• Advertising data banks: ethical and consensual approach to personal information mining
• How do we achieve more meaningful content consumption?
• Collaborative Artificial Intelligence: Minority Report but less dystopian
• Material Interaction: cyberfabrics? cyberceramics? cyber-glass?
• Human-AI Interaction
• Can we plant a building?
• Designing for special needs: how granular can we go?
• How does environment and upbringing affect creativity?
• Can we think like someone or something else? Imagine presets for your brain that enable thinking like different people or even animals
• What does a self-sufficient world look like?
• Reverse biomimicry: can we model our surroundings based on how humans are built?
• Affective computing: emotion reactive interfaces
• Human-Robot societies
• Emergency preparedness for mega-disasters: think airlifting an entire city
• Biohacking: without physical harm or medical procedures
• Ethical algorithms: no algorithmic bias
• Portable Quantum Computers
• What is the future of Computers? Transistors are nearing the size of atoms. Is there a performance peak we will achieve? Or is there a new realm waiting?
• Ethics of space exploration: we can’t treat other bodies like Earth.
• Asteroid Mining: Trillionaire maker?
• Designing for aging populations: how do we ensure seamless transition?
• The future of gig economy workers in india
• Building generative art out of randomness in everyday life
• What if we could change our brain? Presets and other models of thinking at will. Think like a dolphin?
• How do we talk to influential people of the past? Socrates, Plato, Euler. Einstein, Hendrix all come alive for conversations
• Butterfly effect of decision making: what if we did one little thing differently 20 years back? Making sense of alternate realities
• Facilitating deeper connection and collaboration among remote/ distributed teams
• A better way of visualising health and bioinformatic data
• What does an ideal city look like?
• Human-machine integration: what if a robot was working in the seat next to you? (inspired by Interstellar)
• UX/UI of quantum computers
• What is the future of democracy and governance?
• Designing for quantum information
• Tangible Bits, Atoms and Interfaces: how do we make computers invisible and provide more value to users?
• Personal Data sprawl: a better way to manage personal data and information?
• Grand Unified Design
• Visualising higher dimensions
• The future of food and nutrition
• Decentralised societies
• Circular cities: a self-sufficient area that gives and takes equally
• Future of trust and verification: central repository of “truth”
• How do we design for a population that doesn’t exist?
• The future of education: providing high quality personalised education for all. Can robots help?
• Bulletproof reputation systems: electing those who actually deserve to lead
• The future of movies and media: what if you are the main character living inside a movie?
• A world with no crime: what does human society look like with only peace?
• The future of work: reducing overhead and spending more time doing quality work
• What does ideal life look like?
• What is the point where technology plateaus?
• Invisible wearables: how do we allow wearables to be non-intrusive and provide more value to users?
• Augmenting humans: treating our bodies as a technological canvas with add-ons and accessories that allow us to do more
• Can we create geniuses? What if we come up with a blueprint?
• The future of gaming: what if we could put ourselves inside a game?
• Folding@home / PCMR: what are some other applications of distributed computing for social good?
• How do we develop a intuitive way of understanding complex concepts in mathematics and the sciences
• Designing better communication systems for families in different parts of the world
• Designing for family resilience and support systems for single parents
• How can we conduct more authentic and seamless user research and participant studies?
• The future of trade schools: what are skills that will be useful 100 years from now?
• A better way of monetary borrowing in times of need: can we have a less predatory form of loans?
• Designing innovative homes for large / multi-generational families
• Exploring the relationship between brain development and the early adoption of learning technology for small children
• Designing support systems for families with specially abled members
• Using design, data visualisation and technology to create stronger bonds between families
• Reactive and iterative physical data visualisation tools that help people lead a better life using numbers
• What is the future of personal and communication devices? How do we seamlessly integrate them into our daily lives without having to carry them around? The Humane AI Pin is a great example.
• Generative interfaces: what if we generate interfaces based on user prompts?