With Halloween right around the seasonal calendar, a lot of people are going to begin designing their own costumes. I have found a few creative costumes for your enjoyment and inspiration — some cute, some scary, and some just really clever.
Construction machinery dinosaur with a cage baby monster baby Nacho Libre chicken crossing the road Indiana Jones video game monster iPhone vending machine Bumblebee
Going back to school means a lot of people buying a whole lot of new things. Teachers, students, parents; we are all consumers. With so many designs keeping the environment in mind during planning and manufacture, it would be nice to see a few students sporting green with their back to school gear. Here are a few products to get you started.
Newton running shoes are more than just green. The shoes laces, webbing, insole top and outer sole rubber are made of recycled materials. And there is more; the package is made of the same post-consumer paper waste as egg cartons. And to get greener than green, the shoe is stuffed with a pair of new socks and a reusable bag to avoid useless tissue paper that would normally get tossed after opening.
Every new school year sees last year’s trends moved aside for the hottest new items. Well, try going green with this 100% recycled material backpack. The cost of the backpack even includes a donation to American Rainforests, so chances are you will be helping to add a tree or two for your money well spent.
Radiohead, noted to be one of the greenest bands out there has extended its line of apparel to raincoats. The nice thing about their designer coat (other than it is made for Radiohead) is that it took 15 recycled PETG bottles to create it. Look cool, feel cool and be cool with this post-consumer jacket this fall.
And speaking of rainy fall weather, if campus life has you traveling by foot from class to class, be sure to pack an umbrella. This umbrella has a canopy made of 100% recycled PETG bottles with a frame made of 70% recycled steel, aluminum and ABS plastics.
Pack up your pencils, pens and markers into this recycled supply pouch and feel good knowing that the world has one less tire in its landfills. And while you’re at it, stuff in the ruler made of, “read it together class: three plastic cups.”
Who goes to school without a notebook. If you are going to have to take notes, you might as well write onto something worth writing on. This recycled material notebook will have you daydreaming and doodling in no time, thanks to recycled juice cartons and plastic boxes.
Highlighters are a must for most note-takers and young scholars. Why not go green when you go yellow by using these Zebra-Eco highlighters made from 74% post-consumer waste. Go ahead, stuff it in that pouch you just read about.
Packing your lunch is a must for some students, by choice or necessity. Do it in style with this second-life juice pouch bag. This ECOutlet bag is made from materials once known as trash, but now known as green.
I would have to say the biggest complaint about going green, is all the green you spend in doing so. Although it can be costly to buy environmentally responsible products, sometimes I think it is worth it to do so, as with this computer. With an 80% smaller size, using 70% less energy and 75% less printed paperwork to go with it, this Dell desktop computer is definitely getting greener. You can even recycle 95% of the product after it becomes obsolete.
Adjust your speakers and sit back for this one. This is an inspiring video about all things creative. The video was presented at a benefit show for the Ontario College of Art and Design back in 2005, but it has stood the test of time.
What a creative way to take notes. Many people rely on visual aides to remember things (think doodle as you take notes), but imagine the power of a 3D doodle. By following the steps printed on these adhesive backed notes, you can make any reminder stand out from the rest.
This sketchbook offers a compromise for all of the blight-ridden commercial building owners and street vandals who claim to have no other place for displaying artwork. Full-page spreads of New York City’s grimy cityscapes, abandoned vehicles and vacant storefronts make this sketchbook a means for cathartic artistic behavior without having to incur property damage or create an everlasting eyesore for commuters and city residents.
When you are creative, the sky is the limit. At first glance, you may have a sudden urge for a cheeseburger and Coke to go with this basket of hot fries. Look a little closer and you see the fries and ketchup are really pound cake and icing.
When you use all that is around you to exhibit your knack for creativity, people look. The opportunities to wow people with your designer’s eye are all around you. Box cake with canned icing is easy. Slicing and dicing fries out of pound cake and replicating the color and thickness of the best ketchup ever is harder to do.
Remember this the next time you have the opprtunity to take it to the next level with whatever you design. It doesn’t matter if your medium is wood, metal or cake, if you have a passion for detail and a creative mindset anything is possible.
“Dr. R. Keith Sawyer, a professor of psychology and education at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of the country’s leading scientific experts on creativity. His research has been featured on CNN, Fox News, TIME Magazine, and other media.”
1. What are some of the main barriers to innovation in the work place?
There are many different ways that an organization might block innovation. One common one is the quite sensible desire to increase efficiency, productivity, and quality. Yet if that is the sole goal, then the potential problem is that the organization can become overly risk-averse, and unwilling to tolerate the failures and dead-ends that always occur in innovative organizations. Balancing these two necessary goals is difficult; every innovative organization does it a bit differently. The last four chapters of my book GROUP GENIUS discuss this and other blocks, and give examples of how the most innovative organizations have overcome them.
2. Name one person who influenced how you see things?
The biggest influence on my thought is the famous French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Back in the late 1800s, he was one of the first scholars to study groups, and the relation between individuals and groups. I think he was the first to argue that unexpected novelty could emerge from groups; he called it “collective ideation.” He influenced my writings on emergence, creativity, and collaboration.
3. Your book “Group Genius – The Power of Collaboration” – What made you decide write it?
This is my tenth book, but the first nine were all scholarly, academic books. I realized that my studies of collaborative creativity had important messages for everyone, not just for other scientists. So I wrote GROUP GENIUS to spread the lessons of this research to as many folks as possible.
4. You believe that creativity is always collaborative. Explain to me the importance of brainstorming, and how to engage in a healthy brainstorming session with peers and professionals.
In most companies, brainstorming is not very effective—because it’s not done right. In GROUP GENIUS I summarize decades of research showing that brainstorming fails more often than not. But the research has a silver lining: it shows what you need to do to get it right. First of all, if a company has an organizational culture that is not innovative, then holding a one-hour brainstorming meeting will end up being a waste of time. Second, the face-to-face brainstorming session has to be combined with solitary creative thought, both before and after the session. Third, there are well-known blocks to creativity that have the potential to occur in any brainstorming session, and you need a facilitator who is trained to watch for those blocks. For example, brainstorming groups often get stuck in one train of thought, with lots of suggestions in the same narrow area—and a facilitator can help the group make sure to cover a wider range.
5. What is one easy thing businesses and organizations can do to become more innovative and creative?
The researchers who study innovation are pretty much in consensus about what organizations have to do to become more innovative. And I think it’s safe to say that none of it is that easy…otherwise, you’d see a lot more innovative organizations. One of the easiest of the many recommendations in GROUP GENIUS is to become a more open, outwardly-focused organization. Encourage your people to constantly stay in touch with customers, key business partners, and even with competitors. More than half of the successful new products originate outside of the organization.
6. Any advice you would give an individual with an entrepreneurial idea or invention?
Don’t get too possessive and secretive; the worst thing you can do is to hole yourself up and stop communicating with the world. Every idea can become stronger, and the way to make it stronger is to combine it with other ideas, to test it out with a wide range of potential customers. Your idea is almost certainly not completely unique; others have had similar ideas, and the Internet makes it easy to search for those precursors. Learn from them.
7. You have written that, “in innovative organizations, people are always moving around, bumping unexpectedly into others, and stopping for a few minutes to chat. Offices that support these natural connections have chairs and tables in the hallways or near the stairways, to make such conversations easier.” What other architectural details can hinder creativity, and which ones propel it?
Any architecture that keeps people alone and makes it hard for them to work together can hinder creativity. A good example is all-too-familiar: a long hallway, with each person having their own office, and a conference room down at the end. Every office needs some space for solitary work, but in most buildings the space is almost completely skewed toward solo work, with almost no space for collaborative work.
8. You quoted someone who referred to a theory called “opportunistic innovation.” This theory means you wait for an opportunity with a big pay-off (and low investment), then set your goals and go for it. Inspire our innovative readers by promoting this idea of avoiding setting large goals but, rather, paying close attention to opportunities as they become available.
The main theme of my book is that successful innovation is almost always improvisational. My own research has focused on super-creative groups like jazz ensembles and improv theater groups. When you look at the history of innovation, you always see an improvisational process. Ideas end up being used for a different purpose, in a different project, or to satisfy different customers. An “opportunistic” attitude is one that acknowledges the unexpected improvisational turns of the innovation process. Some organizations (and leaders) are overly focused on the plan they’ve developed, and they end up not seeing the opportunities that emerge unexpectedly.
9. Do you think the Internet has helped us as a society become more innovative, or not?
Absolutely! This is the theme of Chapter 10 of GROUP GENIUS. My book is similar in some ways to a lot of recent books that rave about “Web 2.0″ or “collective intelligence.” The difference with my book is that I show that innovation has always worked this way; it’s always been an improvisational and collaborative process, and it occurs in what I call a “collaborative web.” One example of a collaborative web is the geographically dispersed community of Quakers, economics professors, and frat brothers who developed the Monopoly board game over a 30-year period. The main difference with the Internet is that these collaborative webs are more dense, and the innovation process is speeded up—it will never again take 30 years for an innovation to emerge.
