Free Idea Factory

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.

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.

When I was looking at colleges to attend I toured the Northwestern campus–it’s a HUGE university. The guy who was giving the tour used to work in Housing. He told us that the folks in Housing like to have their fun. He said that this year they put a Paul McCartney in the same room with a John Lennon, and, that the previous year they’d put four John Smiths in the same room.

I always thought that’d be a great one act play. Four guys named John Smith who live together in the same dorm room.

A play with a very large cast, like, say, Merry Wives of Windsor, performed in a venue with a very small stage, like a coffee shop’s open mic stage.

A way for Amazon.com to help put the Kindle in people’s hands so that they can get a hands-on test drive and possibly learn to love it: make the devices available to upscale restaurants at or below cost with a limited-functionality block such that they only load the current menu file off of the restaurant’s server–or, better, restaurants upload current menu to the Amazon server which pushes to the device. This way restaurants can have always-current menus put in front of customers with no printing costs or problems and Amazon can sell a region-specific browse the menu service that is constantly kept current by the restaurants.

In the future, computers have adavnced to the point of realizing artificial intelligence. The only programming language they respond to is poetry.