Side Project: No Ideas But In Things

Anyone who follows my Flickr stream has lately probably wondered WTF is going on. All of a sudden, instead of cute pictures of my daughter, there's all these seemingly-random shots of stuff. Well, they aren't random, they are for my new side project No Ideas But in Things.

I was inspired first by Bill DeRouchey's History of the Button talk at Web Visions, then by Andy Clarke's Creating Inspired Design talk at Web Directions South a few weeks ago. In Andy's talk, he urged designers to look to the outside world for inspiration instead of just looking at other digital things. This seemed reasonable and fruitful, so that's what NIBIT is: a collection of physical things for my inspiration. And, if you are an interaction or product designer, hopefully yours as well. I'm compiling a (hopefully large) set of different physical objects and parts of objects, from handles to dials to control panels to different animations.

One reason I'm doing this is that, after Andy's talk, I realized that although I use my creativity almost every day, I don't do very much to nurture, nourish or expand it, to deliberately broaden my palette. I hope NIBIT (along with my blog education experiment) does this for me.

Originally posted at Tuesday, October 17, 2006 | Comments (3)