The definition of what constitutes an innovative idea has gotten pretty loose lately. Challenge your team to come up with truly revolutionary ideas that create a distinct competitive advantage. Here’s how.
Laying Pipe By Helicopter To Bring Water To The Driest Parts Of The World
This amazing device can unspool three miles of hose from a helicopter in a matter of minutes, to easily get water to places far away from any source.
Read more about this life-saving innovation here.
![How Google Unified Its Products With A Humble Index Card
“We’ve actually tapped into one of the oldest pieces of graphic and information design around—business cards, calling cards, greeting cards, playing cards.”
“The restraints of the card actually made it easier to do the rest of the [Google Now] design,” Duarte recounts. “It forced us to focus. It forced us to realize [things like], you can’t have a card that feeds two or three images at once, that just gets messy.”
Here’s the full story.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/0dd4e5cb53c186839c6d2e28605d38ce/tumblr_mmwhouE8ja1qzt7h7o1_500.jpg)
How Google Unified Its Products With A Humble Index Card
“We’ve actually tapped into one of the oldest pieces of graphic and information design around—business cards, calling cards, greeting cards, playing cards.”
“The restraints of the card actually made it easier to do the rest of the [Google Now] design,” Duarte recounts. “It forced us to focus. It forced us to realize [things like], you can’t have a card that feeds two or three images at once, that just gets messy.”
Big philosophical ideas reduced to simple shapes, from graphic designer Genís Carreras .
A house powered by exercise?
The JF-Kit House by the Spanish design firm Elii is an experiment in “domestic fitness,” rendering “the image of a possible future where citizens produce part of their domestic energy requirements with their own physical activities.” Each room features a fancifully named exercise station that would, theoretically, help create energy to power the home, including an “arm workout bureau,” a “spinning kitchen,” and a “triceps greenhouse.” A video shows the home’s imagined inhabitant lifting weights, cycling, and doing calisthenics as part of his house’s everyday upkeep and daily chores like cooking.
What do a startup king, a social network innovator, a hip hop prince, perhaps the best actor on television, and two absolutely hilarious dudes have in common? They’re all among the Most Creative People—and we can learn quite a bit from the way they work.
How color-coded notes make you a more efficient thinker:
Separating “branches” of your map by color stimulates the creative side of your brain, helps you visually separate and recall distinct themes of the stuff you’re working through, and encourages you to map through even boring topics that seem cut-and-dry.
“Add a dash of color … and all of a sudden the notes come alive. They are unique, they are unusual, they are memorable and they are more interesting.”
La Boriosa: Based in Treviso, Italy, Biascagne Cicli makes custom, mostly single-speed and fixed-gear bikes from used and vintage new-on-stock components.
Shape Field Bike: San Francisco–based studio Shape Field Office partnered with Nicholas Riddle, a framebuilder and founder of the Urban Mobility Lab at California College of the Arts, to create this handsome porteur-style conveyance.
Bough Bike: Dutch designer Jan Gunneweg sculpts bespoke wooden bikes from his workshop in Alkmaar. He’s planning to introduce a lower-priced wooden bicycle line.
Thonet Bentwood Concept: Legendary furniture maker Thonet commissioned Andy Martin and his London-based studio to design this limited-edition roadster, marrying the low-tech methods that Michael Thonet used to build his 1830s chairs with 21st-century technology. Martin didn’t rely entirely on traditional steam-bending techniques but employed a CNC machine to cut and join the wood frame, which sits on off-the-shelf carbon wheels. Such craftsmanship doesn’t come cheap; you can get yours for $70,000.
Inside Graham Hill’s single-room, 420-square-foot apartment.
“One of the easiest ways to go green is to go small,” Hill says. “I want to show people that there’s an amazing modern green future, and make it easy for them to step into it.”
Hill transforms his couch into a bed, makes a desk appear from the wall, and then moves that entire wall to reveal a guest bedroom. Just as quickly, he disappears the guest room, pops a Murphy bed back into place, and reveals a dining room table with seating for 10. Even Hill’s bathroom is multifunctional: He soundproofed the toilet stall and added a handsome wooden bench that folds over the seat, which turns it either into a private phone booth or, no joke, a very tiny meditation studio. That’s why he and nine others who are trying to change how we live made our list of The 100 Most Creative People of 2013.
5 Ways To Innovate By Cross-Pollinating Ideas
Tina Seelig details how to combine unlike concepts to find the next big thing.
- Combine unlike ideas.
- Talk to people.
- Build on existing ideas.
- Hire a diverse workforce.
- Use a metaphor.
Read the story here.
An idea for Bangalore: a green infrastructure that is both sustainable and deeply rooted in the local culture.
Dubbed the “Urban Mosaic,” this idea for Vegas involves modular cubes can be combined in any number and configuration to turn the strip’s streetscape into a meaningful public space for events both big (i.e. New Year’s Eve) and small.
In a new campaign, Reporters Without Borders shows world leaders flipping you off.
All the leaders depicted are of the nondemocratic sort that some might label dictators—the kind who might restrict the freedom that journalists enjoy in other parts of the world with the kind of gleeful “f*ck you” depicted here.
Many design firms buy the new Adobe Creative Suite whenever it comes out. After all, the software is a mainstay for anyone who creates on computers. But today, Adobe has announced that there will be no Creative Suite 7. That’s because the Creative Suite is giving way to the Creative Cloud—a subscription-based model in which you pay for access to Adobe’s software monthly. And as it appears, their famous individual products that traditionally make up Creative Suite, like Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign won’t be available for individual purchase, either.
