December 24, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Entertaining and Fun.
Issues: Education, Environmental, and Food Waste.
Yo Gabba Gabba! (http://yogabbagabba.com/#) is a live-action program aimed at young children. Like programmes such as Sesame Street and Teletubbies, it has an educational element encouraging positive behaviours, such as learning a new skill or interacting with friends, but dressed up in the vibrant colours, catchy music and awesome characters that make entertaining TV.
We also think its clever that they frequently feature household names such as Elijah Wood, Jack Black, Tony Hawks and members from internationally successful bands like The Killers, so the secondary audience (parents watching with kids) are kept interested and encouraged to stay tuned. They cleverly select these cameos from the pool of celebs that would be of greatest interest to this audience – so 90s bands such as Weezer have made an appearance. Inspired.
There are lots of Yo Gabba Gabba! branded products that can be purchased from their online shop, ranging from CDs to clothing, from interactive books to lunch pack accessories. One that is of interest to our work on food waste (https://wearewhatwedo.org/portfolio/food-waste/) is their “Party in My Tummy” book, which familiarises children with healthier foods and encourages plate clearing. This is a good example of a very implicit approach (https://wearewhatwedo.org/what-we-do/) to behaviour change – kids aren’t told to reduce waste, rather the positive behaviours that reduce food waste are encouraged via an engaging product that has incentives to use and buy it beyond social change, including entertainment for kids and an easy life for parents.
Yo Gabba Gabba! is broadcast in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and Ireland and performed live shows throughout the States last year (often to sell out venues) and won the Best Non-Animated Series and Best Music at The Kidscreen awards this year.
December 10, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Entertaining, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Mental Health.
The Tripy II GPS (http://www.tripy.eu/en/tripy-2-gps-road-book-motorcycle-road) is a satellite navigation system which, as well as helping people to arrive at their desired location in the fastest or shortest route, also helps people to travel via the most scenic route. According to the website “Tripy’s clear and simple guidance system will take you on the most scenic tourist routes. Its instructions are very easy to follow so you won’t lose sight of the road or the scenery.” This is a great example of a tool for implicit (or hidden) facilitative behaviour change as it is designed as a commercial product but can help people to take a break and prioritise things which are conducive to subjective wellbeing, which can aid their mental health, while they are traveling.
December 3, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Entertaining, and Fun.
Issues: Mental Health.
According to it’s creators “Collect is an app for iPhone & iPod (http://collectphotoapp.com/) that helps people create a rich record of their lives by storing one or more photos every day in a monthly calendar” though this app “was purpose-built for photo-a-day & Project 365 enthusiasts” as an incidental consequence it has leveraged the ubiquitous nature of smart phones and popularity of ‘daily photos’ to facilitate mindful photography. Mindful Photography is a positive psychology exercise which evidence suggests can increase positive affect by increasing feelings of gratitude that come from dwelling on the things that you are happy for. Positive psychology experts Jamie Kurtz and Sonia Lyubomirsky state that they believe “mindful photography to be effective because it helps people examine their everyday lives….with an eye out for beauty, meaning, and value”
August 6, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and social.
Issues: Community and Education.
As part of the yearly series of Priceless London Lates presented by Mastercard, spanning London Zoo, The Victoria & Albert Museum and The Natural History Museum, The Science Museum Lates (http://bit.ly/ZXvdVh) provide a fun and nostalgic experience for big kids looking for an alternative night out in the city. Filled with after-workers and friday night socialisers clutching beers whilst rehashing the science lessons of their youth, the Science Museum pits itself as a quirky alternative to bars and pubs for over 18s.
We think Lates, as well as being a cool night out, are a great device for kick starting adult learning, taking grownups back to school with all the fun of not being a child.
July 30, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Entertaining, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions and Environmental.
The concept of Soccket, by Uncharted Play (http://unchartedplay.com/), is a beautifully simple one which puts fun theory to work. Soccket is a football with a difference. As well as providing kids of all ages with hours of fun, this clever device converts the kinetic energy of play into green energy that’s powerful enough to light a room for hours.
Currently Soccket’s core market comprises of children without reliable access to energy and whose only alternative to a Soccket is often a dangerous kerosene lamp, diesel generator, a wood burning stove or darkness. However, we also think this provides an interesting example of how to embed change initiatives into our daily routines. If every child in the western world was given a Soccket, whose green energy they used to light their room at night or charge their mobile phone, imagine how much electricity could be saved. Not to mention the impact on childhood obesity.
Soccket makes using alternative energy sources interesting and easy, by prioritising play and fun over sanctions, campaigns and guilt.
Currently Sockett’s core market comprises of children without reliable access to energy and whose only alternative to a Socckett is often a dangerous kerosene lamp, diesel generator, a wood burning stove or darkness. However, we also think this product provides an interesting example of how to embed change initiatives into our daily routines. If every child in the western world was given a Socckett, whose green energy they used to light their room at night or charge their mobile phone, imagine how much electricity could be saved. Not to mention the impact on childhood obesity.
Socckett makes using alternative energy sources interesting and easy, by prioritising play and fun over sanctions, campaigns and guilt.
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 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.
June 4, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Cool and Fun.
Issues: Recycling.
We wonder how many pencils Vincent Van Gogh got through before he chopped off his ear. How many pencils the polymathic hands of Da Vinci discarded after hours of drawing, writing and inventing. As the average pencil only lasts 40 hours, we’re guessing a lot!
Unfortunately, once all of these pencils are done doing their part to create amazing and timeless works of art, they become a little bit of a non-biodegradable nuisance. Adding an additional 140,000,000kg of often toxic waste to the world’s landfills every year.
Enter Sprout (http://www.democratech.us/sprout/). The pencil that, as the website puts it, “wants to be a plant when it grows up”. When Sprout is all used up, instead of throwing the pencil in the bin, you plant him. Then, after some nurturing you’ll be the proud owner of a brand new herb or plant.
We love this product for its ability to get people rethinking their everyday behaviours. Perhaps in the future we’ll be less prone to chuck things out when they appear used up and instead start to ask, what new, useful and beautiful thing could this stick become when it’s old enough not to be a pencil anymore.
May 28, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, Saves energy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Environmental.
What we love about The Atom by Sive Cycle (http://sivacycle.com/), is it’s simplicity. It takes a 180 year old green energy concept and applies it to a popular activity to solve a common need of modern times.
The Atom is a useful device that attaches to the back wheel of a bicycle where it harnesses the kinetic energy generated as a result of your regular cycle. This energy can then be used to power any USB charging device such as an iPhone. That could be a god send for avid riders who increasingly rely on a whole host of mobile apps to guide them through cycling adventures.
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.
February 25, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool and Fun.
Issues: Environmental, Health, and Inter-personal Contact.
Geocaching (www.geocaching.com/) is a digital-age version of treasure hunting. Using the GPS in your phone, and a string of clues, you hunt down little treasures hidden in caches in your area. There are 1,993,050 active caches and 5 million geocashers located all over the world. A usual cache may contain a constantly lengthening logbook of people that have found the hidden spot or some small trinket or toy that can be traded around caches.
In a similar way to how www/Historypin.com uses cutting edge technology to breathe new life into looking at old photos, making it an activity 16 year boys might reconsider, Geocaching repositions outdoor play and physical activity for an age that is obsessed with gaming, tech and gadgets.
Geocaching gets people engaging with the history and geography of their local area, breathing fresh air, doing physical exercise and most importantly, enjoying themselves.
February 5, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and social.
Issues: Community, Education, and Poverty.
When Skateistan’s founder Oliver Percovich first travelled to Afghanistan in 2007 he was met with groups of local children very eager to learn how to skate. What began as informal lessons, and Oliver giving away the boards he brought with him, has expanded into a real skateboarding scene in Afghanistan and the development of an International non-profit charity providing skateboarding and educational programming in Afghanistan, Cambodia and Pakistan.
The charity works with anyone between the ages of 5-18 but tries to keep a focus on street working children and girls. In the charities own words, ‘Skateboarding is simply “the hook” for engaging with hard-to-reach young people’ and from there they work to provide the children with new opportunities in cross-cultural interaction, education, and personal empowerment programs.
http://skateistan.org/
January 22, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Fun and social.
Issues: Communication and Education.
The idea, Nick Hornby declares, is that kids “are basically duped by the fun they have.’’ Very Incidental Effect. To the kids it’s simply a world of crazy tales of monsters, zombies, spies and detectives. But the Ministry of Stories http://www.ministryofstories.org/ aims, through running creative writing workshops, to inspire children to transform their lives through storytelling. Using one-on-one mentoring, young people can enjoy improving their language skills, increasing abilities in communication as well as developing their social and educational confidence.
Inspired by the work of a friend, who opened a similar centre in San Francisco, Nick Hornby, Lucy Macnab and Ben Payne founded the Ministry of Stories in 2010. The project involves mentoring young people aged between 8-18 in the art of creative writing from a centre in Hoxton, East London. It encourages and assists the children in writing films, horror stories, soaps or whichever other form of storytelling they wish, without being too prescriptive. So far they have worked with 5000 children in East London and with the right donations and sponsorship they aim to set up a nationwide network.
October 2, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, and Fun.
Issues: Recycling.
Self named the “World’s Library”, Book Crossing strives to make sure books don’t just sit on shelves and gather dust, but circulate around the globe. When you become a member of the site for free you can register your book which will be assigned a BCID (Book Crossing ID) that you place inside the cover. When you’ve finished reading it you pass it on either to a friend, stranger, or by leaving it somewhere like a café or park bench, then simply check back on the site to see where the book has gone and who has enjoyed it. Frequent users also upload wish lists on the site and fellow Book Crossers may choose to send used books along to someone they know will enjoy them rather than leaving it to chance. This gives more people access to great books, reduces waste, and if you are on the receiving end you get the benefit of a totally free read.
August 28, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool and Fun.
Issues: Environmental.
Could a simple sound effect inspire more people to throw their rubbish into a bin rather than litter? Volksvagen’s “Fun Theory” campaign thought so and decided to try it out by creating the world’s deepest bin. The bin was rigged to produce a cartoon like sound of a very long fall followed by a large crash every time a piece of trash was thrown in. This illusion fascinated passers by and inspired them to throw 41kg more of their trash into this bin than a similar one nearby.
August 21, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Fun.
Issues: Community.
The Waitrose Community Matters initiative makes giving to charity a bit more fun: shoppers get to pick the local causes that the individual stores donate to by dropping a token in one of three boxes. You’re only putting a green disk in a box, but for some reason people love it.
Every month, each branch donates £1,000 (£500 from Convenience shops), which is split between three local charities, while once every quarter waitrose.com donates £25,000 to be split between three national charities. Waitrose divides these donations proportionally according to their customers preferences, as indicated by those awesome green disks.
August 14, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool and Fun.
Issues: Local Business.
Self named “the world’s handmade marketplace,” http://www.etsy.com/ has created a platform for small businesses and individuals all over their world to connect to buy and sell handmade or vintage goods. Etsy believes that small, local companies can have a big impact on the worldwide economy, and that their customers value the origins and producers of their products as much as price and convenience. People go there to make up a buck, get their artwork seen, or pick up an innovative gift, but get the added benefit of supporting local businesses along the way.
August 7, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool and Fun.
Issues: Community and Disability.
By taking away all natural and artificial light sources the restaurant Dans le Noir? gives their customers the unique experience of eating completely in the dark. Guests are led by the blind staff to their tables and have to eat everything from soup to pasta in the pitch black.
It is marketed as a novel eating experience, helping you “experience your sense of taste, smell, and sound like never before”, but it incidentally helps you experience what it’s like to be blind or visually impaired, at least for a few hours.
It puts us in mind of the dolls teenagers are given to experience the responsibilities of having a baby: but instead of the experience being something forced upon you by a matronly Sex-Ed teacher who insists you “know what it’s like”, it’s something droves of people are paying for as its positioned as an interesting culinary delight.
July 24, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, Saves money, and social.
Issues: Communication and Inter-personal Contact.
This helps people befriend new people, reciprocate hospitality and get to know new cultures and languages, but for the users, it is primarily a practical tool to find cheap accommodation in other cities. It’s packed with incidental benefits. CouchSurfing has a network of almost 4.5 million users spread across 253 countries. This completely free service can help you connect with people while traveling, or even in your own town, by allowing users to create profiles and search for people in areas they want to stay or offer up their own home. CouchSurfing hopes to create, “a world where everyone can explore and create meaningful connections with the people and places they encounter” and they are well on their way to achieving that goal.
July 6, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, and Fun.
Issues: Community and Inter-personal Contact.
If a brief had been written that set out to find a way to get young people to gain an appreciation for old films, an understanding of the society, politics and culture of different periods, and a shared interest with people of older generations, Secret Cinema would be a perfect solution. Hoping to create an environment where you can live the films rather than just watching them, complete with elaborate sets, actors in character to interact with, and restaurants and bars of the era, Secret Cinema gives moviegoers a chance to cultivate appreciation for the old films in a new way.
July 3, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, and Fun.
Issues: Environmental.
Richard Reynolds, the original Guerilla Gardener, has transformed gardening from something practised solely by the middle-class middle-aged types, to an edgy pastime for young urbanites. It reminds us of Tom Swayer in Huckleberry Finn who turned the chore of whitewashing of Aunt Polly’s fence into a treat. “Do you call this work?” He told his friends. “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence everyday”. Soon Tom’s friends were not only paying for the privilege but deriving real pleasure from the task. He transformed a situation in which compensation was required to one in which people would pay to get in on the fun.
You don’t have to pay to get involved Guerilla Gardening, but if they started charging we wouldn’t be surprised if people were prepared to pay. Would the same trendies have offered to help out in the parent’s garden’s? Probably not. And that is the great magic of Guerilla Gardening: it repositions a worthy behaviour (cleaning up where you live, getting to know your neighbours, getting outdoors, doing exercise) as something cool and fun.
June 29, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Fun.
Issues: Community and Health.
Most of us have at least one guilty pleasure reality show we hate to miss, but there can be benefits beyond escaping into entertainment, especially if your go-to show happens to be Strictly Come Dancing. By inspiring viewers to learn to dance themselves, and providing a publicly visible space for people of different generations and backgrounds to interact and have fun together, Strictly Come Dancing has had some majorly positive impacts. Plus, who doesn’t love those costumes?
June 12, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Homelessness.
Buying The Big Issue isn’t simply an altruistic way of helping the homeless – there’s a well-written magazine in it for us.
June 8, 2012, 2 comments. See and add yours.
Good is: Cool and Fun.
Issues: Education.
Minecraft is a great example of using an addictively fun game (especially of you’re an 11 year old) to engage people in issues and thinking they would otherwise consider boring. A computer game that gives a child a sophisticated understanding of alloys, compounds and elements, for example, as well as an ability to explain the need for a subtle balance between competition and co-operation is a great example of the Incidental Effect. Within formal education, teachers are exploring these features of this game and many more. See minecraftteacher.net for example
Minecraft, and other games like it, can achieve profound, progressive collateral effects on users and society because it is really good and people love it (over 21 million people in fact).
June 1, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, Saves money, social, and Useful.
Issues: Recycling.
The art of Swishing (going to parties to swap clothes with your friends, preferably ones brought with rather than those currently being worn…) was launched in 2007 and became all the rage (as our Mums would say) amongst certain trendy circles. Making recycling populist, sociable and even a little bit edgy. Find out more.
