How we do itAn alternative food plan for young people on the move
The Swiss retailer Coop just launched a brand with 50 convenience food products for swiss teens. The brand and products were created together with BrainStore. We involved the target audience, convenience food specialists, packaging experts and the people from Coop in several workshops.
We learned a great deal about the habits and needs of swiss teenagers when it comes to food. Food needs to be uncomplicated and fun, can be healthy but should not shout about it, low priced without being completely cheap and have a design you want to show around without being too trendy (it’s only food, ok?).
The 50 products include all-time favourites like the giant brownie, energy drink, toast, pizza and donuts, but also new inventions like “planet salad”, a milkshake called “do me a flavour”, “maccaroni & cheese” (very well known in the US but quite new for the young crowd in Switzerland), sweets, smoothies and yoghurt like the “latte macchiato” mix.
Most meals come with an attached cinnamon chewing gum to chew after eating, and the design is very fashionable indeed. “Plan B” is the food that you eat on the go, when you just want to grab a bite and when you want to have some fun with your friends. read more (in German, French or Italian) on the official web site of Coop.
Touch it. Understand it.
Children do it. If they want to see how something works, they touch it, move it, turn it around. But as we grow older we seem to distance ourselves from haptic understanding. Designers nowadays will happily work solely with computer models to learn about interaction in the real world. At Adobe however, things are changing, as G. Pascal Zachary reports in The New York Times.
Bringing human hands back into the world of digital designers may have profound long-term consequences. Designs could become safer, more user-friendly and even more durable. At the very least, the process of creating things could become a happier one. While working in simulated computer worlds has undeniable appeal, Mr Tulley (crafts trainer for Adobe) says, “the physical act of making things helps the whole person.
At BrainStore we believe that haptic stimulation is vital to trigger unusual inspirations. We will engage the participants of our creative workshops in 3D modeling with play-do, painting with water colors, assembling collages – the creative interaction causing ideas to be conceived and expressed in a completely unexpected way.
What a busy time it was!
New offices, new products, new Brains and projects around the world; an exciting, fast-paced year slows down during our yearly summer break. It’s time to take a deep breath, lean back and sum up last year’s happenings before the IdeaMachine will take up speed again on August 6th.
…we produced ideas in Munich, Mainz, Dusseldorf, Geneva, Addis Abeba, Perth, Orlando
…we transformed factories and meeting rooms into vibrant ideahubs
…we hired new Brains and trained them to skilled idea technicians
…we opened an office in Long Beach, California
…we helped our clients to install and run their own IdeaMachines…
How Markus talks about ideas
Creativity Central – a blog about creative thinking, innovation, ideas, and brainstorming – recently interviewed our Co-founder and IdeaDirector Markus Mettler. Here you can read the full interview.
Want to hear Nadja talk about creativity and innovation?
Our friend Geoffrey from the Group Brilliance Blog lately posted this interview with BrainStore’s Co-Founder Nadja Schnetzler. If you understand German…. Have fun listening!
Flying Book Results
And what a party it was! We had great fun last week developing ideas for flying books with Artist Not Vital.
You can find pictures and all the ideas by visiting the special site we have created. Have fun!
Geoffrey Thomas attended the event as a lateral thinker. Read about his unique experience on his blog Group Brilliance.
Wanted: A flying Book!
At the IdeaFactory in Biel, we are today looking for ideas for a flying book. Sounds strange? Swiss artist Not Vital, who works in Switzerland, Africa and the US, had a great idea for an exhibition with flying books. But: How do we make the books fly? We are finding out today with the artist and 50 participants from Switzerland, among them children, teenagers, BrainStore clients and experts in aerodynamics. Come back and visit this blog to find out some of the solutions.
“Give Climate Change a Human Face”
The Global Humanitarian Forum, chaired by former UN president Kofi Annan, aims at being a unique platform to address key humanitarian challenges. The Forum was launched in October 2007 and aspires to build a stronger global community to better meet the needs of the poor and vulnerable.
The first annual conference of the Forum at the beginning of this week in Geneva focused on the humanitarian challenges of climate change. In the aftermath of Myanmar’s Cyclone Nargis and in view of the ongoing global food crisis, the Forum’s President Kofi Annan called together 300 leaders from all sectors of society worldwide to urgently address what he calls “the human face of climate change”: the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations are affected by ever more violent storms, drought and floods.
The Annual Meeting 2008 pooled the expertise and experience of an uncommon combination of leading people from across sectors. They worked to develop creative solutions and boost action to meet the urgent needs of those worst affected by climate change.
In solidarity with the world’s most vulnerable, the Meeting will place climate justice high on the agenda as the guiding principle in the international response to climate change and as the basis for any future global climate agreement.
BrainStore will take part in the project “Give climate change a human face” by conducting several idea finding workshops to come up with practical solutions which will help the vulnerable communities in the affected regions.
See more information on the forum on their website
Look at it with Children’s Eyes!
For everyone who works in the field of ideas and innovation, looking at the world with fresh eyes is vital. And who can provide a fresher look than kids? I strongly believe that being in contact with children is vital to the success of any venture that has to do with innovation. You do not necessarily need to have kids of your own, but you should get exposed to children regularly to see how a complete new look at the world can create new ideas.
At BrainStore, for instance, we have our own daycare called the “MiniBrains” that helps us do this. Everyone at BrainStore gets in touch with kids between one and nine years old on a pretty regular basis, and it is a lot of fun. Listening to children, their views of the world and their interpretation of the weird stuff that goes on on this planet is crucial for us. So the grown Brains spend time with the Minis, playing Lego, eating Fishfingers, discussing the universe in general.
You can learn so many things from children. And most of all, it is often hilarious. My 5 year old daughter Ella asked me at the Birthday party of my Grandfather, when a lot of black and white pictures were shown: “And since when is there color in the world?”, clearly analysing that, not always, has the world been full of color. Or my son, when explained that “this was a long long time ago, when your father was a child” stated: “Oh, during the middle ages?”.
Clearly, this is not only fun, but also very instructive for your own way you look at the world. So go out and get in touch with not only your inner child, but children in general.
Emorational: Conscious Cues? Indeed!
One of the long enduring ideas in human psychology: the moment of decision-making is not pre-determined by a single default of the brain, e.g. by a person’s character being calibrated to more of a rational or emotional nature.
Human behavior rather reflects a dynamic interaction between two distinct subsystems of the brain, as a new study by psychologist Adam Alter of Oppenheimer Lab at Princeton University fortifies. While a first affective system follows heuristic cues, a second conscious and rule-based system monitors the quality of these emotional signals. Although perceived as one single act, decision-making appears to be a two-step process.
This dualism is very well reflected within as well as over all the three major phases of the BrainStore method. For inspiration boosting we pull emotional triggers, in compression we integrate emotional yes or no sessions and systematic criteria scans. At the end of the day, decisions on ideas are taken rationally – given that our emotions play along.
