There is a saying that a picture is worth more than thousand words. So to speak, pictures tell stories more vividly to viewers than plain text stories do. Furthermore, if photography met illustrations, the impact of the story would be amplified.

Let’s take a look at the pictures below:

The illustration that is inserted on the photography appropriately puts emphasis on what the author intended to tell. I don’t know what this type of creative artwork is called, but whatever the case, I believe is this creative reproduction is of great value.

What would happen if a crowd participated in this creative reproduction activity? The result would turn out to be quite interesting. We are preparing this kind of feature which would enable the users to reproduce photography to tell more vivid stories in papree.com. So stay tuned for further updates.

Search method is getting more and more sophisticated. As Web 2.0 era comes, multiple tagging system becomes de facto standard for searching contents. It is a great advancement because it enables people to reach what they want to know through various keywords.

However, it is still inside the boundary: text-based search. Today, I would like to share some attempts to overcome the text-based search.

musicovery

Musicovery is a web radio service playing music that matches user’s both explicit and implicit needs. You can search music by genre or even by your emotion. Seeing is believing, so go ahead and check it out.

retrivr

Retrivr is a new way of searching images. As you can see in the picture above, you can scribble on the small canvas to look for similar images. I drew a red circle and got some photos like strawberry, balloon, and a lady bug. Do you think it works?

Third principle of invention is called Local Quality.

Solar cells are usually made with homogeneous materials, using the whole white light as the source of energy, but by breaking down the light into different spectrum and using optimized materials and methods for each band of spectrum, efficiency can be raised to a greater level.

By definition, principle of local quality is about changing an object’s structure or external environment from uniform to non-uniform state. It can also mean changing functionality of a certain part, such as a hammer with a nail puller on one side.

In business, implementing localization is about local quality. Fast food franchise usually mix-in a variation of local/national food with the standard menus. In terms of organizations, embracing flexible workhours to a group of employees can be considered principle of local quality as well.

So, how would you change a part of your work to increase efficiency? How can you make it less uniform to raise its effectiveness?

We have studied creative storytelling in advertisement before. This article is about a similar topic.

ADESF, one of the anti-smoking associations in Brazil, has recently launched stop consuming your body campaign. Take a look at the pictures below:

The campaign is very straightforward and easy to understand. Its tagline, “stop consuming your body”, is also well-written.

No-smoking campaign probably exists in every country out there, but how direct the message is and how much emphasis is on the harm from smoking may vary depending on the countries. If we can investigate these over all of the countries, we might be able to figure out the affinity between the public and the smoker community. This might turn out to be a very interesting project to dig.

[via adgoodness]

Last time, we took a short dive into TRIZ and its first one of the 40 principles of invention: Segmentation. Today, we’re going to look at the second principle: Taking Out, or Extraction.

By Taking Out, we separate an interfering part or property from an object, or separate an interfering part or property from an object, or single out the only necessary part (or property) of an object. Well, this is basically the definition, and now let’s take a look at some examples.

The most commonly quoted example of this principle is air conditioner and its external compressor:

The noisy compressor is located outside the building, leaving the comparatively quiet and pleasant air conditioner on the inside. By taking out the compressor, problem of noisy air conditioner was fixed.

Second example is fiber optic cables, where light pipe is used to separate the hot light source from the location where light is needed:

As in flash lights, in general, lights are used directly toward the surface where light is needed. By separating the light from the source, we can transfer and use the light in places where we want them, and by further developing the idea, technologies now enable us to transfer data through fiber optics.

Third example is from a rather conceptual approach, but became quite effective as a result. By taking out the sound of a barking dog, we can implement the sound as a burglar alarm.

There is an analogy of extraction and open API, now found widely among new web services. By taking out the functionality through open API, we can extend its use across different services, allowing new and creative mash-up services to emerge.

ProgrammableWeb holds a huge collection of mash-ups out there, and the chart below shows a healthy growth of new mash-ups around the web.

In business management, the practice of outsourcing can be considered taking out as well. Sometimes, business requires a function beyond its core capabilities, thus building that function by itself might not be as efficient as it hopes to be. In such case, the business may then outsource the functionality to a more specialized company in that field, to reduce risk as well as to increase effectiveness at the same time. Obviously, this may not always turn out to be successful, but you get the idea.

So, that was the second principle of inventive problem solving! See you next time.

MIT Mobile Experience Lab has introduced very stunning work, named ‘the cloud’. According to the cloud official website, it is an organic sculpture that responds to human interaction and expresses context awareness using hundreds of sensors and over 15,000 individually addressable optical fibers.

Let’s take a look how the cloud works:

The Cloud - from mitmobileexperiencelab on Vimeo.

It detects users’ presence and engages with users through its multi-touch interface via fibers. This multi-modal interface generates various responses ranging from ambient lighting to animation and sound.

What I most anticipate among the interactions with the cloud is the tactile engagement. I love to touch the soft things. Of course, optical fibers are one of them. After seeing the film of The Cloud, I came to imagine about an iPhone with a multi-fiber touch interface. What do you think about a hairy iPhone? Don’t you think it might be lovely?

There is a wide belief that creativity is like rolling a dice, or a strike of lightning — that ‘Eureka!’ moment. While it is quite true that many of the ideas and solutions we come up with, generally comes from intuition and inspiration, but it is also true that this ‘intuition’ is based on a intricately structured system inside our heads. So, instead of telling why it is important to keep exposing ourselves to new inspirations and wait for that ‘Aha!’ to dawn on us, let’s take a contrarian route and deluge ourselves into something about systematic creativity.

Around late 1940s, a Soviet engineer and researcher named Genrich Altshulle, and his colleagues developed a methodology called TRIZ (Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch; Russian) which means “The Theory of Inventor’s Problem Solving.” It systematically drives problem solving through processes and framework, along with its 40 principles of invention.

It is widely adopted by Fortune 500 companies, mostly in manufacturing business like BAE Systems, CSC, Procter & Gamble, Ford Motor Company, Boeing, Philips Semiconductors, Samsung, LG Electronics, but let’s not get into too much detail about TRIZ itself. Instead, I want to focus on the 40 principles of invention, and perhaps run a few articles on these principles.

First of them is Segmentation: Asking the question of ‘What if we segment this?’

We can segment something by dividing it into independent subsystems and making it more modular. As a programmer, we do this everyday. I’m sure there are still arguments about efficiency and effectiveness besieging this, but the whole concept of ‘object-oriented’ programming, decoupling, plugins, and alike are basically process of segmentation. When something becomes too complex and monolithic, it becomes unmanageable, the progress becomes sluggish, project renders itself inert.

Take a look at the excavator below:

As you know, excavators basically dig, and when they keep digging hard surfaces, teeth worn out pretty easily. Older generation of models had teeth molded together into one single tooth, which brought out a lot of waste during replacement. Engineers thought through this problem and came up with segmented teeth as you can see in the picture above.

Conceptually, marketers do this as well. The STP method in marketing starts by segmenting the market, targeting it, then positioning in the market. Although we can simply just yell to everyone about the product, which is basically what the first generation of web advertisement banners were doing, we can segment the market (by demographics, user behavior, etc.) and increase efficiency and effectiveness all together.

People often apply segmentation without thinking about it, but it often comes in handy to explicitly search for solutions by systematically sorting through possible approaches.

We have studied several creative arts including creative cup design, tree drawing and creative clock. Today we are going to study creative food sculptures. Let’s take a look the pictures below:

Creativeness might be revealed in various aspects in modern art. These food sculptures are examples of work from creativity in material selection.

We eat, see and live with those oranges, watermelons and broccoli, but it is hard to think of those being hero of the exciting stories. This is the difference between ‘seeing‘ and ‘discovering‘. We have ’seen’ them, but couldn’t ‘discover’ them. Thus, we can say that the creativity is the power of discovering.

Now you can add talk bubbles (or annotations) to any picture in Papree, like the one below:

It’s quite easy and pretty fun to use. After logging in, click on one of the ‘add a bubble’ links above the picture and type words in the newly created bubble.

You can also drag the bubble around freely, and place it where you want it to be. So, go ahead and give it a try!

Right now, we only support one bubble per scene, so each time you add a bubble to a picture, you create a new scene, but we’ll also be adding support for multiple bubbles later.

As always, more fun stuffs are coming pretty soon!

I’m a big fan of optical illusions, and Samsung made a nice video of putting 10 different optical illusions in 2 minutes, and it’s also a promo video for their Soul phone, so check out the video below:

via Engadget