August 20, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Useful.
Issues: Environmental, Health, and Local Business.
When we first heard about Hubbub (https://www.hubbub.co.uk/) in 2011, the company with a mission to save the high street, we knew it had the potential to be something quite special. Bringing all of the convenience of online grocery shopping to your local independent, Hubbub lets you purchase items from various local shops, online, and have them sent straight to your door in a single convenient delivery.
Now, just 2 years after they launched, Hubbub is already operating within 35 stores and selling over 4000 products to thousands of customers. Hubbub works by attracting online supermarket shoppers and busy commuters, who wouldn’t ordinarily their local grocer, butcher or artisan baker, to their online shop and taking a small cut of these brand new sales. That’s a win-win for local retailers who, as Hubbub founder Marissa Leaf says, rely on volume to survive.
We think Hubbub is great because it helps to get fresh, healthy and tasty produce into the nations homes without relying on messaging, bribery or government intervention. Rather, it takes traditionally niche behaviours such as ‘shopping local’ and makes them accessible by building them into a convenient, easy to use online service. Plus, as a successful commercial business with a viable model for growth, Hubbub represents a sustainable form of facilitative behaviour change that has the potential to become ingrained in our national culture.
August 13, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Easy and Saves money.
Issues: Health.
We all know that cigarettes are terrible for our health, yet 10 million of us Britons are classified as smokers. Most efforts to break this national habit have focused on communications, government interventions and cheap or free alternatives. However in a 2012 survey by electronic cigarette brand SkyCig, 83% of smokers said they did not want to give up the physical act of smoking (http://bit.ly/1323YKh). This indicates that even when these measures are successful in helping a smoker to quit, switch from stick to patch or chew gum, there would still be many large and unfilled cigarette shaped holes in their daily routine making this new behaviour unlikely to last.
SkyCig’s electronic cigarette presents a different way. Rather than aiming to completely change people’s (often habitual) behaviour, they help smokers to quit by providing a product that allows them to carry on smoking. Electronic cigarettes are nicotine vapourisers that look, act and taste like a normal cigarette, providing all of the social, personal and physiological upsides of smoking (including happy hands), without the dark side affects. Plus, while e-cigarettes are relatively inexpensive, they still take enough of a bite out of the smokers purse for the desired behaviour change to be taken seriously.
There are of course still debates and issues yet to be ironed out as this change-making technology enters new markets, but we think this $2billion industry is definitely one to watch.
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.
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.
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 12, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Useful.
Issues: Health.
Here at We Are What We Do we often talk about how the invention of a product or service can bring about the invention of a new behaviour. Sometimes these new behaviours are indirect, or we often say “incidental” (see https://wearewhatwedo.org/about/the-incidental-effect/), for example, how the invention of takeaway coffee meant we started throwing away substantial numbers of paper cups, or the invention of labour saving devices such as the washing machine gave women the time and freedom to move out the home and into the workplace. Others are much more obvious and direct: like the toothbrush. It’s mass production in the twentieth century (interesting prompted by pharmaceutical companies wanting to sell toothpaste) brought about massive shifts in behaviour which had a major positive effect on dental hygiene standards.
January 29, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Saves money and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions, Education, Environmental, and Health.
The Waka Waka Light http://www.wakawakalight.com/ is a solar powered device that can charge electrical gadgets or provide a minimum of 8 hours light (and up to 80 depending on the setting used) from a single day’s sun. They are a much cheaper alternative to kerosine lamps so are becoming popular in Haiti, Ethiopia, Kenya and other developing nations for families looking for the cheapest solution.
However the benefits of these nifty lights extend much further. Not using kerosene improves air quality and reduces house fires and injuries from burning. Most inspiringly, there is research that highlights the improvements to school results that can be seen when free solar lighting replaces kerosene lighting. This is attributed to a number of factors including more income free for the parents to spend on education and more time in the evening for the children to do their schoolwork. Lots of hidden benefits for a lamp bought for its low price point.
September 18, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Useful.
Issues: Food Waste and Health.
More public awareness about portion control and the health benefits of watching how much we consume at any given sitting have pushed producers to create packaging that is user friendly and helps reduce food waste. For example, many pasta and rice companies have included clear panels on the sides of their boxes that indicate how much to pour out per serving. This makes it easier to watch what you eat, and helps prevent you from preparing more than you will consume.
September 11, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy.
Issues: Health.
Jordans was one of the first companies to start mass producing cereal bars in the early 80s, as an extension product out of their breakfast cereal range, which was itself only developed in the early 70s.
Oat-based granola was previously a staple of the 60s wholefoods movement that swept the health-conscious West Coast of America: very much the preserve of hippies. Jordans repositioned it as something that they could market to the American mainstream: an instant healthy breakfast, much more convenient than the traditional cooked alternative.
Whether their health benefits really did outweigh a more traditional egg-based breakfast is debated in Louise Hidalgo’s documentary “The Food that Make Billions”, but Jordans, and all the other companies that now make cereal bars, did bring a healthy snack that could be eaten on the go to the marketplace and the cereal industry is now worth billions.
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?
May 25, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Fun and social.
Issues: Health.
A vast number of people have started getting into cooking by copying the simple format of this awesome show. Community groups, universities, cookery schools, secondary schools and have run copycat events and informally groups of friends across the country are getting together to compete over who can make the most impressive canape. A much better way to get people eating fresh food than the posters like this, found in your local surgery waiting room.
May 22, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and social.
Issues: Health.
An idea that came out of Volksvagen’s “Fun Theory” campaign. Simply ace. Never before have it been so appealing to run up stairs.
May 8, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Health.
Fitness games, or exergames (groan), on motion-gaming systems like the Nintendo Wii, Playstation Move or Kinect for Xbox 360 have had a big effect on exercise amongst young people.
In a recent study in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, researchers from Brigham Young University and the University of Massachusetts, Boston, found that playing active games like Wii Fit or Dance Dance Revolution could reproduce the health benefits of moderate exercise in kids, likened to walking at about 5 km/h (or 3 mph), or more depending on the game played.
In another recent study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, researchers at the American College of Sports Medicine looked at these benefits in an older demographic—18 to 35-year-olds and found that 298 percent more energy was spent through dance simulation games and 322 percent with fitness video games than sitting at rest.
May 1, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool and Fun.
Issues: Health.
Zombies, Run! is a running game for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android. Listen to a story while you jog (in between music tracks you’ve chosen yourself) and you’ll find yourself pegging it when the zombies starting chasing you. It would get us moving.
April 14, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions and Health.
Punctures. The cost of a new one (or the faff of assessing a second hand one’s worth). Finding a big enough space to store it. The issue of when you want to cycle to the pub but not back. All avoided with our beautiful Boris Bikes (Sorry Ken, who actually brought them in…). Also available in other countries.
April 11, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Health.
whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com. Click through a series of ideas. Funny. Rude. Pass-on-able. And helps you cook a meal from scratch.
