When you spend your life rethinking the built world, discovering things you’d love to overhaul is an occupational hazard. From the very, very big (our housing systems) to the very, very small (shower handle placement), our designers have a lot of thoughts about things they’d like to reimagine, if given the chance.

Here’s a look at what’s on their minds as we head into this new year.

1. Why are shower handles directly in the blast zone of cold shower when you turn them on?
2. Can you imagine traveling by plane and needing to bring your own custom-sized seatbelt to carefully install in the cars you ride in? That’s essentially how we treat child car seats. It’s time to engineer a way to build them into cars. It’d be more sustainable, safe, and inclusive.
3. We need to redesign news around nuance and empathy instead of siloed points of view.
4. Christmas trees! Not only are the needles impossible to keep up with, but there's still a pervasive myth that plastic trees are more environmentally friendly. Real Christmas trees are one of the best examples we have of capitalism working in favor of the environment. A big market creates demand for people to start tree farms, plant and sell trees, and repeat that cycle every year. If you have a plastic tree, keep it—but let's rebrand real Christmas trees as the environmentally responsible (and delicious-smelling) choice.
5. Why do expensive, fancy face creams come in jars with hygiene and air seals that 10 percent of the product sticks to? I look at that cream stuck to the seal and see money, and then I either have to keep the weird seal and line it up to close the jar carefully, or scrape the cream off manually.
6. We have warming garments for everything but our mouths. This creates problems for the place I live, which is Massachusetts. Sometimes, in the winter, my mouth gets so cold and my jaw gets so tight it becomes hard to speak! A wintery vow of silence notwithstanding, I think we deserve socks for our tongues and warming pads for our cheeks. This would also prevent the tongue-on-frozen-pole problem that seems to have plagued humankind since we built metal poles. Lick all the poles you want! You’ve got a tongue sock!

‍

7. How we reward and compensate people who make other work possible. Why does childcare cost more than college in 2/3 of states, and yet childcare workers make so little? Why does an IPO reward employees for the work they put in, but not the caregivers for their employees' families? Why can't we price and pay the true value of care work?
8. Housing! Not only in the financial sense around the lack of affordability and equitable access, but also in terms of different models for home/land ownership. By rethinking both the architectural design of spaces and alternative financial/organizational structures, we can develop community-oriented, sustainable, and equitable housing models. Let’s learn from indigenous communities and cultures that prioritize multi-generational family systems.
9. Why is it that companies invest so much money in customer service and still play that horrid, staticky acoustic music that makes your phone speaker sound like it's an AM radio death rattle? Here's my idea: You still need a sign that you're on hold, so it can't be total silence, but why not experiment with different formats? What about a trivia quiz that moves you up in line the more you get right? What if you could connect your Spotify account and play your own hold music? What if you could do on-hold karaoke? So much of what passes for customer service is just what companies think is the blandest possible way to treat people. But by playing it so safe they create an experience that makes everyone equally miserable and bored. More courage, please!
10. Public restrooms are unhygienic. Why does everything from door latches to paper towel dispensers require your hands or shitty sensors that don’t work? Our feet are awesome tools, and wildly under utilized in public spaces. My favorite: In the Charlotte airport, they have hand sensors for soap dispensers, but they all broke, so they’ve installed hand pump soap dispensers above the sinks. It takes most people 30-60 seconds to try all the automated dispensers before they notice the old school soap above.