Top Ideas for February 2019

Photo by Dmitri Popov on Unsplash

Month 2 of the Idea Machine Challenge, baby. We still here. AND I DIDN’T MISS A DAMN DAY.

Niiiiiice.

This month, I seemed to be coming up with a lot less pie-in-the-sky ideas and a lot more ideas influenced by problems I was experiencing day-to-day, or from things I could see in my apartment. In other words, they were more grounded in actual utility rather than fantasy. I also experimented with more themed lists — the first two below were some of my favorites. (I even had a day where I wrote “10 Ideas for ’10 Ideas’ Lists” which ended up becoming some of the idea lists I wrote. Meta as hell.)

One problem that I found with the way I was operating this challenge this month (and last month as well) is that I was giving myself too much time to do this task (as in, no time limit). That meant I overthought, shot down ideas I didn’t think were good enough, and generally defeated the point of the exercise. In March, I want to set a 10 minute timer and just barf all my ideas onto the page in those 10 minutes, no matter how ridiculous they are. That is what makes truly beautiful ideas come to life.

I have also been trying to add a daily habit each month. Last month’s habit was writing 10 ideas a day (so meta). This month’s was drinking green smoothies every morning, made with spinach, kale, ginger, lemon, cucumbers, cinnamon, cilantro, celery, blueberries, bananas, red peppers, nuts and hemp seeds. I have never felt better in my entire life. I have more energy, more focus, I feel more hydrated, and I’m just happier. Veggies are a beautiful thing.

Ight. Here’s a long list of things I popped out of my brain, organized by category. Tell me which ones you love, which ones you hate, which ones inspire you, which ones you had spin-off ideas for — whatever the hell it is, say it. I do this to start a discourse, so I’m hoping that some of these ideas will spark fire in others the way they have sparked it in me.

10 Underwhelming Story Ideas

• A man finds the meaning of life and is severely disappointed.
• A woman loses 15 pounds and can’t seem to find them.
• A tree falls in the woods and three people hear it even though they are not in close proximity.
• A woman hit snooze and wakes up in another decade.
• A dryer has a specific “tumble dry low” setting. Hilarity ensues.
• A woman wakes up every morning, goes to work from 9–5, then dies 40 years later. Unknown causes.
• A man dies, goes to heaven, and realizes that the gatekeepers are the holy cows, mackerels, and shit that he had heard so much about.
• A world where silence literally deafens people
• A man finds skeletons in his closet and is confused about how they got there
• A world where silence literally turns to gold and people are crushed beneath its weight

10 Ideas for Acts of Kindness

1. After and during every phone conversation with a friend, write down and dates and times for major events coming up and set reminders in your phone. Text them good luck and congrats before and after

2. Find old nostalgic pictures of people when they were younger (ask their parents?) and find a way to resurface them and have a place where they can access them at any time

3. Write letters to 5 people every month with a small update on your life and many questions about theirs

4. Write down 5 of the top traits that you admire in a friend, and write them a letter with those things so that they know that they are appreciated for being themselves

5. Cook dinner for a group of friends weekly. Pack up any extras for a few meals for them for the week.

6. Once a month, set aside $50 and buy whatever non-perishables you can and donate them to the food bank

7. Put on a concert with talented musicians in the area where all proceeds go to charity

8. Give out free mid-day massages at work to relieve stress

9. Smile at every single person you pass in a day and say “hi”.

10. An initiative to create more ergonomic desk setups at work to allow people to have less pain and stress caused by repetitive strain, so they don’t carry that stress home with them

FOOD

• An Indian-Mexican fusion restaurant called “Dosaritos” which serves burritos wrapped in dosas.
• A food blog called “Amma’s Adige” where I document mom’s cooking process and her recipes for my children and my family. (“Amma’s Adige” means “Mom’s Cooking” in Kannada).
• Using Joni Bella instead of maple syrup on pancakes
• Paan masala as an Oreo crème flavor
• Banana whip ice cream that you could buy in the grocery store
• Masala peanut mix in a bag — add any traditional trail mix to it and shake it up for instant masala trail mix
• Using automatic food journaling technology (chips in the stomach and brain working in tandem to assess what you consumed and how you feel) and then uses machine learning to discover unhealthy food trends and eating habits that can be fixed through better info and regulations
• Pani Puri and samosas made with sweet potato
• Savory-food-flavored lollipops
• Chocolate-filled dosas (or dessert dosas in general)
• Ghee becoming the primary cooking oil worldwide
• Coffee flavoring and creamer made of green veggies and fruits so you can get nutrition in every cup

HOME & KITCHEN

• Heated mattresses
• Fake plants that “grow” over time (there is extra plant hidden that comes up and becomes visible over time)
• Irrigation systems for home plants that are hooked up to your water supply
• Knife holders that auto sharpen knives between uses
• An oven that preheats instantly.
• Custom cut plastic fridge shelf covers that you simply remove when they get dirty so you don’t have to scrub the shelves
• Heated Ziplocks and Rubbermaid containers
• Bottles (lotion/peanut butter/etc.) that have a push-up bottom to bring up the last dregs of whatever is in there so they aren’t wasted
• A fridge whose entire front is a screen so you can digitally “stick things” to the fridge — photos, things to remember, kid’s art, etc.
• Plant watering devices that extracted water from the air to keep plants perpetually hydrated
• Magnetic suspension bulbs as cool new-age decorative lights in a person’s home.
• A drying rack that uses hot air to dry your dishes instantly — built like one of those conveyor belt toasters. Goes in wet, comes out dry in 10 seconds.
• For stacked washers and dryers, put the washer on top, so as soon as it’s done its cycle, it opens a flap below which drops the clothes into the dryer and starts the cycle so you don’t have to worry about switching clothes from one to another
• Magnetic power outlets. No need for socket hole plugs. There would be a strip of electrified magnetic material on the inside of the wall so you can stick any magnetic plug anywhere on a wall.
• Washers that could run one load with colors, darks, and lights separate
• A daily wall clock that displays how you are spending your time on various activities so you have a visual reminder of bad habits (i.e. spending too much time on social media, TV, etc.)

MUSIC/ART/MOVIES

• A dance video to “I Can Transform Ya” where every chorus the main dancer transforms into a different dancer doing a different style.
• Photographers tend to be in charge of a shoot, directing and posing the models and deciding then best locations. Take a series of pictures that flips that on its head, making it appear like the subject is in charge of the shoot. Take pictures from slightly below pointing up, so the subject assumes an air of dominance.
• A weekly newsletter that educates you on pop culture from the past. Every week, you’d get one fact/quote/article from each of x categories: Music, Art, Fashion, Tech, Health Absurdities, etc. from ‘60’s through the ‘00’s. This will help more people understand pop culture references and expand their palette in order to come up with new ideas.
• Create biographical dance shows of famous people (like Hamilton but with dance instead of rap).
• Mashup “Fat Bottomed Girls” by Queen with any modern-day rap song about booty (ex: “Dance (A$$)” by Big Sean or “Ms. New Booty” by Bubba Sparxx)
• A video that functions as a guided jam session (like a guided meditation) to get the creative juices flowing when people have not jammed together before
• Free reservation-based practice spaces for musicians/dancers in every major city
• A movie about a society where everybody’s face looks different but everyone’s body looks exactly the same, until you’re married to them and their body becomes their real body. How would this change objectification of women (and to a smaller extent, men)? Would it reduce it or would aspects of people’s faces just become objectified?
• Make your stage name “BlackBox”, then make incredibly innovative/different music that no one can understand how you made — you’re a “black box” because no one can see the inner workings. Make a sweet stage show where there’s a black box off stage that people push buttons on as inputs, and the music/show (output) is based on those inputs — every show is different. Down the line, reveal your secrets in a series called “BlackBox: The Inner Workings” or “BlackBox: Opened Up”
• A Broadway show of “Friends”, with the original cast
• A movie that strips one side off an apartment building and shows each a cross-section of each apartment as a “shoebox diorama” stacked next to and above one another. Even though people aren’t interacting, their stories are similar.
• Asian reggae/ska music — the staccato rhythms would be done on Asian stringed instruments and flutes rather than traditional guitars
• Band name: Ike and the Yikes
• A documentary comparing the American and Asian school systems from a viewpoint of traditional markers of success as well as mental health (happiness and life satisfaction)
• Gloves that famous musicians can wear that map to gloves you own that make your hands play exactly what they are playing so you can learn and experience the music

TECHNOLOGY/APPS

• Holographic X-Rays of people’s inside so doctors can see what’s happening in the body in real-time 3D
• Being able to print things right from your phone
• A mini projector built into every laptop that allows you to show ideas on any surface
• Replacing the horn sounds in your car with dumb sound bytes like air horns
• Leverage machine learning to create an app that automatically sends you recommendation of things to do on weekends based on your general weekend schedule/favorite activities
• Cruise ships that had underwater glass rooms that would function as a big aquarium
• An app that works as an idea catalogue. Every time you have an idea, you enter it here, and then tag it with the category it falls under. Then, you can sort ideas by “Music” or “Apps” for easy filtering and searching when you find yourself in a mood to create but don’t know what to make — institute fields for “Rating” and “Approximate time to implement” for easy access to what you want to work on next
• Pens that track how you’re moving your pen in 2D space and automatically sends the writing to a computer.
• Motorized shoes — like a Boosted Board, but right in your shoes like Heelys
• VR dance and yoga classes that let the instructor see the way your body is positioned and moving so they can correct your form
• Whiteboards that have movable horizontal lines to make writing on them neater. Possible implementation: make the board semi-translucent. Have a small space behind the board, and have a laser pointer pointed across the board horizontally, lighting up a line from behind. Put that laser pointer on a slider and have it move up and down to move its position.
• Make every road on Earth out of solar panels, piezoelectric materials, and Peltier elements. This way, we would get electricity from the sun beating down on the road all day, from heavy cars passing over the road, as well as from the temperature differential between the warm surface and the cool subterranean Earth.
• Make a giant tunnel from Antarctica to the center of the Earth. Use Peltier elements (huge ones) to take advantage of the enormous temperature difference and generate electricity for the world.
• Using magnetic suspension technology to charge phones in mid-air
• Harness the force of rain falling on roofs to generate power
• An app for menus at restaurants where you select the types of flavors you want in your meal(e.g. smoky, spicy, creamy, sour, etc.) And it filters the menu down to what you might like
• A dating app that puts you and another person on a blind date with a random scheduled activity (the app plans it and pairs people) — you and the other person are in it together, which I think is sometimes the easiest way to break down walls between people
• Heated soles in boots so the snow/ice melts under your feet and you don’t slip
• An app that shows a comparison of your/your friends’ weekly schedules so you can schedule time to talk when you and them are both free — a more hyper-focused type of Doodle poll
• Holographic pins that appear above the person you’re trying to pick up in an Uber so you can spot them easily
• AR navigation that is actually “visible” on the road (through your windshield in a Heads Up Display — only you can see it) so there’s no distracted driving
• An app that tracks your thoughts & areas of your brain that are activated throughout the day and gives you metrics on how mindful vs. distracted you are (Like the iPhone weekly screen usage report, but for your brain)
• Replacing body parts and facial features on humans as easily as Mr. Potato Head (as in, they are able to be detached and replaced quickly)
• An “emergency” toggle for phone calls/texts that the sender can activate. The receiver’s phone will vibrate and make noise and even come off airplane mode/silent to alert the receiver this is something they should look at their phone for. Otherwise, people retain the feat of “What if?” that keeps them checking their phones all day long
• An app that has timers for anything that needs to be replaced every x months/weeks/days (e.g. a toothbrush every 3 months) that beep when you need to replace them
• An app that picks two random genres daily and puts them together (e.g. pop-classical, Asian-reggae) and then shows you artists/songs that match that genre combination
• An app that creates random jam groups with a few people playing different instruments in your city, and gives you random unique prompts for what to work on together so you can see what comes out of it. Have a community section where you share what came out of the jam session to the world.
• An app that rates busking locations based on profit, volume of people, quality of crowd, etc.
• TimeHop digital picture frames — every day, it will dig back in your archive of photos (maybe Google Photos) and display a picture that is from this day x years ago — daily nostalgia
• A system that uses a messaging API to send a notification to guests of a wedding as they walk through the door to let them know their seat number
• Shoes that can detect the moves of someone on the dance floor and teach you how to do the moves on the spot
• An app like Jenzy that sizes shoes for adults. Partnerships with brands means you don’t have to manufacture. Down the line, license the sizing software to brands like Nike to put in their own apps.

HEALTH AND WELLNESS

• An app where you can track the way you feel day by day and it tells you whether your vatta/pitha/kapha (the Ayurvedic doshas) are out of balance and gives you recommendations to fix it
• Discovering a way to retrain your brain and optic nerve to perceive things the way they should be seen despite structural differences in your eyeball, so that you can see without glasses without needing LASIK.
• Sensors in your muscles that can detect muscle overuse and tell you to take a rest day
• Keyboard/mouse combos that visually track the position/orientation of your hands and lock up unless your hands are in ergonomic positions. There would be a full screen gentle alert to move your hands to a proper position.
• Sensors to detect muscle tension in your throat/face for singers that will beep to remind you to engage intercostal muscles and lower support again.

“What if?” Questions

• What if, when we establish colonies on other planets, we start them up with completely different rules for each planet? These rules could often go against what we perceive to be the “right” or “moral” way of thinking. It would be applying first principles thinking to life — every planet is Earth starting anew, and we could learn new things about the human psyche and behavior this way. (or, if it’s radical enough of a change, alter the human psyche in ways we wouldn’t have imagined)
• What would life be like if clothes had never been invented and we were naked all the time? Would attitudes towards sexuality and conservatism take on entirely new, absurd forms, or would we have a more sexually liberated society?
• What if society was set up on the underside of a mountain that is turned on its head? Too much imbalance in weight to any one side will topple the whole thing. Maybe this is some comparison to how polar extremes in viewpoints keep society balanced, but too much thought in only one direction can be dangerous.
• What if we could train our minds to think the complete opposite of every physical we know? Would the differences actually make life difficult or is it just a matter of different labeling (i.e. if we say that “up” is “down”)? How much would it really affect one person’s quality of life if he/she was the only one that thought this way?
• What would happen if names entirely disappeared? How would we get someone’s attention?
• What would life be like if humans had to find another energy source other than food? What energy source would we evolve to take in?
• What if the life we’re currently living is actually the afterlife and the life we lived previously was so completely different that we could not perceptually comprehend it with our current sensory abilities? *hits blunt*
• What would happen if the news and media didn’t exist? Would people fall prey to crime more easily because they are not informed of its presence?

RANDOM

• An underwater wedding — literally underwater. Everybody is in scuba gear. The Mandap is made of coral and the whole wedding venue is decorated like Atlantis. People who don’t want to be underwater get a livestream on the shore.
• A metaphor for conversation: it is like the tides. When you start, you are at low tide, and the more you talk, the more the waves crawl deeper into the shore towards high tide. But if at any point you put up a levy (maybe an uncomfortable question or you close off), then conversation can’t proceed past that point, and will stay surface-level until the tide recedes back to nothing (as does the conversation). You’ve got to ask a good question or bring up a good topic to break that levee down.
• 5k runs that have to be run backwards
• T-shirts where the inside is made from those super soft shag throws
• Face changers for famous people so they can live their day-to-day like normal people. This opens up a whole world of possibilities where uber-talented people who don’t necessarily have the “silver screen look” could have a persona that is just for the screen, and we would never know who they really are. It would operate almost like a witness protection program.
• Roads made of a heated and salted material so snow melts immediately upon contact with it — no more plowing or shoveling.
• A quick summary of what you just finished reading last time you picked up the book, shown every time you open the book, so you don’t have to back-skip to figure out what just happened
• Ping pong with a raised net where the goal is to only get it in the small gap beneath the net, not over, and the rest of the rules are the same
• Tags on clothing that are sent to your smart watch when you touch an article of clothing in a store so you don’t have to hunt for the price tag/size (use the removable beige plastic security tags that are already on them to have RFID)
• Sell advertising real estate on men’s faces — shave your logo into their bear/hair so they become a walking billboard