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…..
July 16, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, Saves energy, and Saves money.
Issues: CO2 Emissions, Environmental, and Health.
Named by Fast Company (http://bit.ly/ZzMPa5) as one of the most innovative companies of 2013, Green Revolution (http://www.egreenrevolution.com/) is a company that applies a niche concept (renewable energy) to a mass activity (the gym).
Selling $200 generators to gym owners, Green Revolution’s technology helps people to convert their exercise into electricity. We think this is a deliciously simple and practical way to introduce green energy to a mainstream market, using behaviours that millions of people perform every day to help cut their carbon footprint. At the time of writing, Green Revolution had already helped gyms to generated 214,049,837 watts-hours of green energy. That’s enough to power the Olympic Stadium for well over 8 days.
July 9, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Entertaining and Fun.
Issues: Education and Health.
This week’s Good Ideas Blog is all about The Walking Classroom (http://www.thewalkingclassroom.org/), an amazing not-for-profit set up by American teacher Laura Fenn. After noticing a direct link between the academic performance of her students and regular physical activity, Laura came up with a way to fuse the two.
The Walking Classroom provides teachers with Walkkits for their entire class, preloaded with age appropriate literary content based on national education standards and the school curriculum. The Walkkits, which are iPod sized audio players, make it easy for teachers to get students out of the classroom for 30 minutes. This helps to wake up sleepy kids, entertain active ones, and kick start students’ learning potential. We think this is a really simple and interesting product which bypasses the need for communicating the benefits of exercise for childhood health and education, and gets right down to business. It encourages children to get moving, pay attention and learn, all by letting them do the one thing that any kid wants to during the school day. To get out of class.
Currently hundreds of teachers across the United States use Walkkits as part of their lesson plan, and we hope to see products like this becoming more pervasive throughout the educational sector.
July 2, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Entertaining and Fun.
Issues: Health.
At around 40 square miles, the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida (https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/) is almost twice the size of Manhattan. That’s huge, and with four theme parks, two water parks, two spas, fitness centers, five golf courses, and much more it is every bit a gigantic playground “where dreams come true”.
However, hiding deep beneath the rides, shows and amusements is an amazing incidental benefit that is so cleverly disguised in fun that you’ll hardly notice it. Exercise! According to one visitor, during a 11 day trip to the resort she walked a total of 110 miles (http://bit.ly/YmrmCI). That’s the equivalent of 3 marathons in 11 days. Another visitor recorded walking up to 15 miles per day (http://bit.ly/18cHRmF), and with the parks spanning 92 miles it’s not hard to see how.
We think disguising exercise as fun is one of the most interesting mechanisms for sustained behavioural change, exemplified in sports like football which are played religiously by people every week, many of whom would never dream of joining a gym.
Next time you visit a theme park like Walt Disney World, Six Flags, Alton Towers, Chessington or the like, try to work out how many miles you rack up. We think you’ll be fascinated at how much secret exercise you can get your children to do while they’re walking, running and skipping with joy.
June 25, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Entertaining.
Issues: Community and Education.
For anyone who didn’t catch the latest BBC Two series “Toughest Place To Be A….” our first question is why not?
Based on the simple premise of taking British workers halfway across the world to do their jobs in some of the planet’s most challenging conditions, this programme has seen a bus driver, a paramedic, a firefighter, a fisherman and many more cross oceans to find out just how much tougher their jobs could be.
As well as being incredibly interesting TV, we think this programme is also an excellent device for encouraging cross cultural awareness amongst TV watching Britain. Helping to teach people about new cultures while highlighting similarities between ourselves and people who we might ordinarily never get a chance to met. We think this is a quite and clever way to encourage cultural awareness, acceptance and empathy in a mainstream audience without lectures, lessons or force.
It’s an idea we’d like to experiment with on Historypin (http://www.historypin.com/) more too, connecting people around the world with shared interests, hobbies and jobs.
June 18, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Saves energy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions, Environmental, and Food Waste.
The Samsung Smart Fridge is the latest in a new wave of products hoping to form the first wave of commercial products to deliver on the promise of the Internet of Things. The Samsung Smart Fridge, as you probably suspect, is a connected refrigerator. It runs on Google’s mobile operating system Android, and comes equipped with a 10-inch wi-fi enabled touch screen that helps users to do many handy things like look up recipes, check their calendar, send emails, receive coupons, check their twitter and even track the expiry date of their food.
Whilst there is a public impression that more gadgets means more energy usage, this isn’t necessarily the case.
As technologies like this becomes more pervasive, they can make ‘environmentally good actions’ much more convenient. Imagine what a dent we could make in the 1.3 billion tonnes of food wasted globally every year if every standard fridge never let us forget that the cheese in the back was about to go mouldy, or that we should really make lasagne today because as well as that cheese there’s also a packet of mince we bought and it’s expiring tomorrow.
We think smart, connected, ambient technology like the Samsung’s Fridge, may not only help to create a world that is ever more convenient to live in, but also one in which it’s increasingly easy it is to perform those little simple positive behaviours we often forgot, overlooked or couldn’t be bothered with in days gone by.
June 11, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Easy and Fun.
Issues: Health.
While inventors are busy figuring out how to create chairs that construct themselves and build even smaller micro drones there are other things which, for some reason, escape the innovation hype. One of those things is the lowly condom.
So, in 2011, California based company Origami Condoms (http://www.origamicondoms.com/) decided to redesign the condom. An invention that hadn’t been rehashed in a over century. Using a new accordion style design, the Origami Condom breaks down the traditional barriers to condom use by focusing on increasing pleasure instead of focusing on purpose and practicality. There is actually an incentive to using it, making “doing the right thing” of layering up more attractive, not just what you ought to do.
Today, over 33 million people worldwide are living with HIV, and some stats (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/basics/index.html) suggest that over 68% of these cases were caused by sexual contact. As the condom is one of the only viable methods of HIV prevention for large swathes of the developing world (not to mention other infections, diseases and pregnancy), this could be a huge win for our global sexual health.
The Origami Condom is expected to be commercially available by late 2014.
