Reuse and repurpose — Adhoc design

Check out this slideshow of things constructed from reused and repurposed materials for inspiration. Some of the examples are squarely in the art category (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) but it there are some great ideas here that stimulate your brain to produce ideas based around repurposed materials that are essentially free for the taking.

One of things shown in the slideshow is using empty glass bottles as a building material. In the same vein, check out the miniWIZ (what a name, eh? sounds like names kids get in the fifth grade locker room . . .) POLLI-Brick. This is a water bottle made with an interlocking shape so that you can build things with the discarded empty bottles. That’s very clever and surely will turn heads regardless of whether it ends up as a commercial success.

Interlocking water bottles provide an easy means to make a wall or form a structure.

This brings up an interesting challenge — this is clearly a good idea, but it’s not clear at all that there is a market for it. Assuming that the production cost is similar to comparable plastic bottles, how would you market this idea? Who would be your first target audience? Are the consumers of the beverage contained in the bottle the same people who might use the bottles for constructing things? If not, how do you get the discarded bottles in the hands of likely users?

Ocarina

Have you heard of this iPhone app that brings an ancient clay wind instrument onto the iPhone? It costs a buck. Hundreds of thousands of people have bought a copy since the program was uploaded to the iPhone App Store only a few months ago. That’s some serious potential for a simple computer program that didn’t require any overhead or army’s of code monkeys to write.

There’s a nice write up about Ocarina and iPhone apps here in the New York Times. An iPhone app would have been a good Crash and Burn idea, eh?

The History of Specialized Bicycles

Here’s a great interview of the owner of Specialized bicycles who sold one of the first “mainstream” mountain bikes, the Stumpjumper. Mike Sinyard started this company on a bike trip in Europe which he financed by selling his VW bus for $1500 in 1972. Read the article to see how the company crashed and burned at least twice. Bonus points are awarded to the first person to get a hold of the Mission Book that Mike wrote and gave to each employee that helped resurrect the company back to the leadership position it holds today.

Sinyard with a replica of the Volkswagen Microbus he sold in 1972 for $1,500 to finance the launch of his bike business.

Have a bike lane everywhere you are

Here is an excellent creative solution to the problem of a town not having enough bike lanes.  Of course, it works only at night but that’s when bike lanes are most useful.  I bet there are variations on this theme for other situations like cross-walks, a personal spotlight/lightshow are two.

Take your bike lane with you.

Eat bugs, make electricity

These guys really are building better mousetraps (and fly traps), except they call them Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots which doesn’t really have a ring to it. In any case, there’s a lamp that is powered by the energy in dead fly bodies and a mousetrap that is powered by dead mouse bodies. I like the synergy — of course you need to either feed the trap some bodies to get it going, or supply some back-up juice if the trap is unsuccessful for a long enough time to use up all of the previous victims’ energy.  I’m not fully sure but these might only exist as conceptual models — think they really work?  How many flies you think you gotta trap to keep the light lit?

The Source of Ideas

Do you make ideas from scratch? Or, are ideas a quilt that you sew together using things you’ve seen or experienced? (These aren’t the only two sources, but a juxtaposition seemed like a good opening.)

If you imagine it’s the latter, where do you get your material for your idea-quilt? Here’s a cool article in the NYT about a social scientist who postulates that some of the most successful idea collectors are people who “live at the intersection of social worlds.”

There are a lot of social worlds on a college campus (especially one the size of Penn State), but often students live within only one. Extend your reach this semester: go tour some new social worlds and try to bring home souvenirs.

"Development" -- a quilt by Leah Evans

Speaking of cell phones

Here’s a concept that seems like it might be best started on a more local scale (although I have no idea what the name has to do with anything).  Could a PSU EIN database be worth doing at $3 per entry?  Each incoming class must be about 10,000 students, so if you got half of each freshman class it would be $15k per year in revenue.  How much could it cost to maintain and promote such a simple system?  Maybe $2k per year for operating and advertising which leaves you with $13k per year to almost cover in-state tuition.  Except you’d only have ~$10k after taxes, so you might need to roll it out at a few other schools.  But once you worked it out here, it would be easier to get it rolling at other schools.  Schools are great since incoming freshman are a fairly captive audience and are worried about losing things in their new big, bad world.

WimpIt is interesting because it’s so simple.  But, its simplicity is somewhat limiting — if a person finds a phone, how is he/she reminded or compelled to check WimpIT (or whatever you’re going to call it)?  Maybe you have to make some cool sticker to put on the phone or branded phone case — but that’s less simple.  A reward system would be a compelling reason, but that also is less simple.  Software that would allow you to log into a website and see where your location-enabled phone is would be really good, but not at all simple (privacy, functionality, etc).

Get it?  The balance between simplicity and functionality is hard to find.  Some smartass once said “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”  Simple, right?

The iSod?

Here’s a concept for a cell phone which has a shell that falls apart at about the same time that your cell phone provider gives you the opportunity to get a new one for a huge discount (and most people throw their old one away). This is an example of a larger design concept that is starting to gain momentum in the marketplace (to make everything out of grass? Nay nay.)

A cell phone concept that has a shell with a useful life on the order of the device.

Why do we make the bottles that we use to transport shampoo from the store to our bathroom out of a material that has a usable lifetime of centuries when the amount of shampoo they contain only lasts a few months? These bottles are way over-designed and cost us money to transport and store in a landfill. You can probably think of many items you buy that are heavily over-packaged. I bet you can also think of some solutions to this problem. Some of those solutions might even be the foundation of a business.

Amazon.com is making an attempt to get away from the clamshell packaging found on a lot of items including kids’ toys. Check out the video and customer “horror” stories about clamshell packaging. There are many reasons to improve the packaging of things : Amazon is spending money on this to improve customer satisfaction and create a reason for a person to buy a product from them rather than the myriad other retailers, both online and off. What other reasons might exist to improve packaging?

If you have some good idea about packaging, how do little old you make a business out of providing that solution? In other words, who is your customer? Manufacturers of stuff or end-consumers? Who/what is your competition — traditional plastic bottles/clamshells/shrinkwrap and the people who provide traditional packaging solutions to manufacturers (e.g. shampoo makers) , or someone else?