Free Idea Factory

Creativity is often more about the process than any specific result, or an orientation towards new ways of approaching things if you will. While we may start out intending to achieve something in particular, the lessons we learn along the way have the power to transform our whole way of thinking and subsequently being. When we seek out creativity, we open ourselves up to a multiplicity of new ideas and experiences.

This post is not particularly a specific Free Idea Factory idea, but rather a gateway to perhaps producing some new Free Idea Factory ideas and finding appropriate applications for them.

While doing some online research, I came across a great collection of Free Creative Thinking Tools, compiled by Chuck Frey of innovationtools.com. The list of links to these tools can be found here.They are free and include downloadable text-based tools and web-based creativity tools.

“An example of one of the tools listed is Jump Start. This online tool, provided by Idea Champions, first asks you to state your problem or challenge. Next, it generates a list of random adjectives, and inserts them into questions to help you to generate fresh ideas and insights (example: “What insights or ideas about my challenge do I get from the word ‘unbreakable?’”). Next, Jump Start asks you to record the underlying principle that is embodied in your favorite idea from the previous step. It also asks you to record any new, actionable ideas are sparked by this underlying principle. Finally, this online tool asks you to enter the subject, e-mail address and name of someone to whom you’d like to send your new idea — someone whose support and collaboration you need to help make the idea a reality.”

Describing how a fish tastes is notoriously difficult. Having dinner at a nice place last weekend, and listening to the server do a pretty standard (thus highly ineffective) job of describing the fish we’d never heard of, I thought that it would be a smart thing for an upscale restaurant to do to cook off a couple of pieces of the exotic fish special for that evening and offer a scant forkful to anyone interested in giving it a taste before they ordered. The dish wouldn’t have to be hot, it could just be explained that the chef cooked a bit of the fish earlier this afternoon, and what you’ll be tasting is cooked the same, but, is a tiny tasty chilled version of it. Texture, taste, and even preparation are now all accounted for in one little smidgen. Sales of these fishes would go nowhere but up.

Take a photo of every single person you know. Hang them in a gallery. Run colored string between the pictures. Color code the strong to indicate the nature of the relationship.

Watching the Olympics, thinking about that guy or that woman running dead last in whatever event and simultaneously wondering how the hell they can be so slacker as to be last and how awesome they must be to even make it to the Olympic finals. What does that feel like, to be so amazingly good and in last place. A book with interviews with last place finishers in world class competition could record those feelings.

A juried art exhibit of crayon art produced by fine artists. Could be done either as an “open” project where artists could submit any kind of work, or, could be fun to limit it to actually coloring pages from a coloring book.

A chain of restaurants that attempt to be as authentic as possible, not just in the food and the decor, but down to every possible detail. It should be, for the diner, like stepping into another country. The wait staff should speak only the native language, the menus in the native language, even change the money at the door if that can be done legally into the native country’s currency. All menu items and ingredients should be as authentic to the native country the restaurant is representing as possible.

It should be like taking a vacation to another country for the time you’re in the place. Not “mostly” but “maximally” so.

like bookcrossing.com but for poetry, esp small press stuff. you leave a chapbook, someone picks it up and leaves one for someone else. getting poetry into the hands of those who want to read it. for bookcrossing.com, the books are all registered with numbers etc. it could be like that or less organized.

people with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) are advised to find ways to be in the light. as someone who gets blue when having to put up with constant sunshine and blue sky, i would love it if there were a place, a room or something that simulates storms, rain, clouds etc. i’d also love winter rooms. summer might be a bit more bearable for those of us who suffer from this rainy version of SAD. i don’t know if there is anyone else that loathes the sun & bluesky as much as i do. perhaps not. i’m also much more creative in rainy, stormy weather or in winter than i am in summer where my brain turns to mush in the horrible heat.

A series of photos and essays based around the notion of what would you take from your burning house if you had one trip in, by yourself (so limited to what you could carry), and all the animals and family members were already safe. I picture portraits of the people with the goods they’d carry, accompanied by interviews that attempt to explore why the items they went back for have so much significance for them.

A series of photographs that are portraits of people holding placards which they’ve hand-lettered with the worst criticism or insult ever leveled against them.