Welcome to our Good Ideas Blog.
Here we gather examples of products, tools and services that we love and that have been created following our own ethos: they don't nag people to "do good", but instead are all things people simply use and like because they are fun, cool, money saving or useful.
And yet in using these things, people are incidentally "doing good" and their actions are having positive effect on a major social or environmental issue.
Ideas posted regularly so keep coming back for fresh inspiration.....
May 21, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
This week’s Good Ideas Blog isn’t exactly mainstream (yet!) and it’s impact probably won’t be felt for quite sometime, but indulge us. Today we’re talking about Google’s Driveless Car. A few months back you may have heard about Google’s car racking up over 300,000 driverless miles without so much as a scrap. That’s more safe miles than the safest driving state in America. However, beyond the amazing fact that a world full of autonomous cars could potentially eliminate the 1.2 million deaths and 50 million injuries caused on the world’s roads every year, what else could be saved? How much petrol might be saved by cars that always select the shortest route and never get lost?
We think driverless cars have the potential to do tremendous good, so we look forward to watching how this disruptive technology plays out.
May 14, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: job providing, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Health and Local Business.
Kit Yamoyo makes delivering medicine to remote villages in Zambia more attractive to local entrepreneurs. It is a clever wedge-shaped packing solution, that fits packets of medicine into a crate of Coca-Cola. Local distributors and retailers can make use of it, not needing to do anything more than they do already in terms of transporting goods from the country’s capital to the remote areas of the country and selling items locally, yet benefit from adding the Airpods to their usual deliveries as they share in the medicine’s profits.
The project was devised by Simon Berry, who worked in Zambia in the 1980s and set up the charity ‘Colalife’ in 2011, who’s core product so far is Airpod. An amazing way to reduce thenumber of people dying from diarrhoea (around 40 children under the age of five each day) whilst giving locals genuine incentives, beyond pure altruism, to get involved.
May 7, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Digital Inclusion and Education.
There will be something else to do on the tube in the future. Three students from the Miami Ad School came up with the idea of setting up a virtual library shelf in underground carriages. Commuters can use their smartphone to swipe the book poster and download the first 10 pages. After finishing the pages, the service will direct them to the nearest library where they can borrow the full book. This project gets people back to the local library, enjoying reading and borrowing physical books again.
April 30, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Community, Digital Inclusion, Education, and Environmental.
Would you know where to find some parsley growing wildly near you? Strawberries? Rosemary? Pears? If not, it is time to think about starting your urban foraging journey. ‘Edible Cities’ is a not-for-profit organisation, created after an observation that there are many fruit trees and edible plants around our urban environment but we do not really use the resource properly. They decided to create an intuitive service platform which offers information based around a map on wild food growing near you, as well as allowing users to contribute to the archive of food sources on the website. The results have been very positive, successfully increasing people’s awareness of their local environment, encouraging them to eat food that would otherwise go to waste, getting people doing exercise outside and eating healthy locally grown food, all in a fun and accessible way.
April 23, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Communication, Digital Inclusion, and Education.
Asking children to catch up with the latest economic, political and social issues is difficult, especially when all traditional newspapers are designed for adults. But Tokyo Shimbun cooperated with the agency Dentsu Tokyo to lunch a groundbreaking augmented reality mobile app which translates the articles from dense text into a child-friendly format. This app enables kids to scan specific areas of the newspaper with their smartphone to activate an onscreen pop-up with simplified language and cartoon versions of current issues. Kids might be hooked in by the prospect of a cartoon,but are inadvertently educated about the current affairs.
April 16, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and social.
Issues: Community and Environmental.
Can “Fun Theory”, as demonstrated in these previous posts (wearewhatwedo.org/good-ideas/piano-stairs/) be used to break down the barriers between strangers? The 21 swings project (http://www.dailytouslesjours.com/project/21-balancoires/) , created by Daily Tours Les Jours, suggests it can. Taking over the high traffic area in Montreal, a set of musical swings was set up, each sounding a different note, and when they were all swung together, acted like a giant musical instrument. Super-fun to use, the swings encouraged outdoor play, gentle exercise, and, perhaps most noticeably, the idea of cooperation. Speaking on their project, Daily Tours Les Jours said, “We believe we can achieve more together than separately.” The project provides a different perspective on connecting citizens with public space, and provides a meeting and talking point for people of all ages and backgrounds. It reminds us of a couple of other projects that involved putting pianos and pingpong tables in public places around cities.