Fresh Takes on Innovation

This Pipe takes the BrainStore Blog, passes it thru a Content Analysis and uses the keywords to find Photos at Flickr for Inspirations. The photos appear in date order.

Clone the “BrainStore Blog Inspiration” pipe and fit them to your interests. And even begin to use flickr.

Pipes is a free online service from yahoo that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code. Learn more…

I wouldn’t wear one of these, but as we like to blog just about every crazy brain-gadget, I’ll have to blog this brainy cap and the gelatine mold to make delicious deserts with a bizarre canibalistic touch. Find more of these anatomically correct products at the Anatomical.com shop.

The effect of brain games is not as clear as one might think. Canadian tech site Digital Home recently questioned if they really work, stating that there is more “anecdotal evidence” than scientific proof, up to now.

Providers of brain fitness software like Luminosity or Nintendo with their bestselling ‘Brain Age’ game, insist on the effect of their “scientifically designed” products.

I played Brain Age myself and found it pretty entertaining and motivating. Still I think, that brain fitness is mainly about using your grey matter in every day life. Try not to use a calculator every time bigger figures come your way. Don’t write everything down, memorize dates, names and figures that surround you. Keep your body in shape, then your brain will be fit, too. Eat healthy, get enough sleep and socialize.

Need more tips? There are tons of brain improvement lists on the net: Try e.g. these 70 tips or these 22 ways to overclock your brain.

We are thinking about equipping our female IdeaDirectors with this beautiful BrainBag by Jun Takashi. But then again it would be too small for a laptop. Hmm…

Found on BoingBoing

Everybody knows: Training your brain will help you staying flexible and creative for a lifetime! On this gamesforthebrain.com you will find a variety of games that will help you stimulate your brain in no time!

For example:

Drag

Mahjongg Solitaire

Find Alice’s mistakes

Try it out and make those neurons grow!

The Japanese are known for their unusual and creative ideas. This one is somewhat between completely nuts and just fabulous: Aya Tsukioka, an experimental fashion designer, has invented a special series of clothing that helps people disguise themselves when in danger. For example, a woman can turn a skirt into a big piece of cloth that looks like a vending machine and that can be hastily put over ones head when being pursued by a stalker in the street. Children can use a special school bag to transform themselves into a fire hydrant.

The fact that such ideas were greeted with straight faces, or even appeared at all, underscores Japanese society’s fondness for oddball ideas and inventions

writes the New York Times, in an article accompanied by a slideshow of these inventions. Thank you for sending us this article, Katie Kontrath (www.getfreshminds.com).

If you are looking for a new idea why not let yourself be inspired by the idea generator? It’s a funny new widget by the team at MonkeyBusiness Labs. Fill in or generate 3 words by pushing the double arrow button. Feel the inspiration and perhaps come up with a new idea!

Try it

This is propably the most high tech bar in the whole world. The IBar finds out which drink you’re having by using sensors that calculate the glass shape and then link it to the content of the glass. So if you drink a prosecco, the IBar will recognize that because you won’t usually have a whiskey on the rocks in a similarly shaped glass.

So what’s happening, I ask myself, if you’re drinking a cosmopolitan… How will the bar recognize that you’re not having a Martini? Will the IBar identify it because of the customer’s gender? Men don’t usually drink cosmopolitans, or do they now? What if the guest is a gay man or a female whiskey amateur?

But experts say that within a few years we’ll be using it to pay for our drink by simply placing a credit card on it. They also say the interactive device will be able to upload pics and videos from your mobile to show off to other bar guests in the same way. Plus punters will be able to flick through food menues, special drinks offers and jukebox tracks on the multitouch bar surface.

The first ever iBar was this week installed at London’s swanky Soho nightclub 24.

In a short but very funny video, David Ngo tells us about his thoughts on how to achieve true innovation in design. The keyword is process. Instead of waiting for a flash of brilliance, the design process applies several steps like needfinding, brainstorming, prototyping, formgiving and critiquing in order to come up with something that is new, functional and nice to look at.

These steps are pretty close to what BrainStore has been doing for almost 18 years: collecting inspirations, compressing them into ideas and selecting the ones worth going on with.

Via Swissmiss

In Germany, Linda Kowsky has established a web site that shows childrens inventions. You can find a letter in which you can ship water, shoes that look like clowds for soft walking, a tickling machine and many more funny and crazy ideas from kids. It is worthwile to look a the charming little database and to learn from the youngest inventors, whose contribution are both good-hearted and inventive and show how a “naive” approach sometimes unearthes better ideas than a mind that has already seen and experienced everything. Children are welcome to send in their contributions.