Connecting Products, Youtube Research, Justin Bieber

I was at a design company today sitting in on a brainstorm session their design and engineering team was having. Weirdly enough it's the first time the company has done anything like it in ten years. Twenty people sitting around a table sharing their ideas. Some good, some awful. It felt exactly like our classes. Some people had sketches, some power point, some nothing more than a verbal explanation. The one thing I noticed was that everyone was not only very receptive to every idea ( even though some were clearly not great ) they were also quick to jump on a twist or improvement to make the product better or different. If an idea sucked, they would tease the person, but then analyze the strengths that made the person think it had some merit in the first place - trying to relay those strengths in to a different product line or idea. Then the chief designer made an observation and request: he wanted his designers to start drawing out products, using language or pictures, side by side, and have them try to find links to connect completely opposing or different genres or product lines to try to come up with new niche ideas. The following is a link to something sent out by one of them after the meeting. It's a couple of guys who decided to make the old video game Tron in to a real life scenario using bikes. Make a computer game real. New game? Why not? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb1Z9VU_Yco Another interesting thing was that they all seemed to research new technologies and ideas using Youtube. Everyone had a Youtube link to support their research and express or explain an idea.

LONELY EGG COMES TO LIFE

This is the fridge of a close friend of mine who has yet to learn how to grocery shop and prepare food. He's 30 so that's pathetic. A proper dinner to him consists of Cornflake end-of-the-bag dust and a hot dog he cooks rotisserie style in his toaster. It came to our attention one night after bong loads and video games that he has an egg broken in the back of his fridge. As I'm sure you can imagine, his disability to cook for himself also reflects in his inability to clean. The kind of guy who sits on his own dried up piss and whenever he has a girl come over begs for me to come up and clean his place - I always refuse.

Anyways, we noticed the egg, had a good laugh, closed the fridge and carried on. Every time I visited for the next month, I would check on the egg. He never opens his fridge so it didn't matter much to him. To my surprise the egg never got moldy, smelly, or rotten. It just sat discretely at the back of the fridge day after day, night after night. One day (about a month later) I decided that this needed to be documented. I brought up my camera and to my surprise it was all worth while. The pictures spoke to a different beauty that was not only aesthetically wonderful and rich with color but defied our previous assumptions about what a broken egg in a fridge for a month would come out looking like. Needless to say, the egg is gone. But the photo speaks for itself....