Brainstorm Ideas With Idea Generator
Developed by creative consultancy The Director’s Bureau, The Idea Generator uses randomly-displayed words to help you generate ideas for your next creative project.
The user interface of the Idea Generator is a marvel of elegance and simplicity, and it’s fun to use. Three concentric circles fill the screen, emblazoned with random words. Situated horizontally across the middle of the screen is a display bar, which appears to have a magnifier embedded within it. This window displays the words selected by the Idea Generator. At the hub of the wheel is an icon with two arrows, which, when pressed, spins the counter-rotating wheels.
For example, one recent session displayed the words “multi-lingual,” “rubber” and “hotel.” Sounds kinky, eh? Actually, you’re not supposed to take the words literally. Their main value is to be a stepping stone to productive ideas. For example, the words multi-lingual and hotel could lead to a new concept for a chain of hotels with the atmosphere of an international youth hostel. Or you might take the word rubber and spend some time thinking about its inherent qualities (cushioning, resilient, etc.), and how you could apply one of those to your current creative challenge.
They have also developed an iPhone version of the generator that gives you access to a “word lists” screen, where you can delete words from the left, middle and right word lists and add your own ones to customize it to your needs, your industry or your profession.
Photo by The Director’s Bureau.
Warren T on April 2nd, 2009 12:16 pm
Years ago I spent a good deal of my day writing 30 and 60 second commercials for the radio station I was working at. You run out of ideas rather quickly. I stumbled across my own random idea generator … I picked up a dictionary, let it fall open to a page, closed my eyes and pointed to a word. Sometimes it took a couple tries to get a word that would spark a decent idea, but it worked well.
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