Today was the first day of Idea Week here at Carsonified and we had a great time!
Gill and I felt that everyone was working extremely hard and needed a creative break so we decided to turn off our email, activate the auto-responders, and ‘close’ the office for one week.
(Ryan writing down product name ideas)
Everyone is still coming in to the office, but instead of working on our current projects, we’re creating something brand new. The only rule for the week is that by 6PM on Thursday, we have to complete the project. It doesn’t have to make us any money and it doesn’t need to fit into anything we currently do. It just needs to be fun and creative.
The first thing we asked everyone to do was bring in an item that brought them joy – hopefully sparking some ideas while also allowing us to get to know each other more. It was basically like Show-and-Tell from when we were kids and it was really fun and interesting to see what everyone showed. I brought in a copy of Trouble for Trumpets, a book that I got when I was nine (and is still one of my favorites).
After that we randomly assigned the following tasks:
- * Ask three random people “What are you most looking forward to today?”
- * Take photos of three book covers that you really like
- * Take photos of three shop fronts that interest you
- * Ask three shop owners to name their best selling product
- * Listen to three interesting conversations and take notes
After everyone completed their task, we met up for lunch to discuss our findings.
It was really interesting because we discovered that a lot of our findings pointed to the fact that others (and us) really long for hand-made items. Living in a mass-produced, extremely efficient and largely digital world, we seem to crave a personal touch. Something that doesn’t fit into the constant pressure to Get Things Done.
We started leaning towards creating a hand-made, limited edition product. One idea was to produce a journal with some of our thoughts on the events of 2007.
So after Lunch, we went to Starbucks to talk some more and brainstorm a few more ideas.
We decided to put the ‘news journal’ idea aside and go another direction. Everyone was really keen on hand-crafting a physical, limited edition item, so we explored a few more ideas. I don’t know who came up with our new favorite idea, but it caught on like wild fire! We all started getting really excited about it and the ideas started flowing thick and fast.
I’m not going to reveal what our idea is yet, so stay tuned. All I can share is that it’s going to be very limited edition (less than 10 items), hand-crafted and free. To get one, you’ll just need to let us know why you’d really love to receive it :) Elliot is going to craft a beautiful site to show it off, which will launch this Thursday at 6PM GMT.
It’s wonderful setting aside all your current work and focusing on a quick creative project. I already feel injected with creativity and enthusiasm. Can’t wait to get rockin tomorrow!
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