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…..
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.
February 19, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Saves money and Useful.
Issues: Communication and Education.
Learning a language can be very expensive. Duolingo (http://duolingo.com/), is great as it is completely free. Fun and engaging lessons are professionally curated, gaming theory is employed so users gain points as they learn progressing them up skill levels, but you never have to pay a penny or be interrupted by annoying adverts.
In addition there is also an amazing and enormous ‘incidental effect’: the service is designed so that, as users progress through the lessons, they simultaneously help to translate websites and other documents, thus contributing to making the web more accessible to all. The task of translating the web is enormous and benefits enormously from human input, as in this crowd sourced model.
The site currently offers Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian courses for English speakers, as well as English for Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian speakers and there are plans to offer Chinese.
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.
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.
April 16, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions and Communication.
Skype makes not flying for face-to-face business meetings a reality. In a 2010 survey, almost half of SMEs in the UK reported plans to increase their use of video conferencing and 59% expected to reduce their business travel as a result. Given that business flights account for around 10% of air travel and air travel accounts for 6.3% of all the UK’s carbon emissions, this represents a significant contribution to efforts to reduce our impact on climate change. Most people don’t use Skype for eco reasons – but because its cheaper and more convenient than flying.
