I have always thought of ideas as the sparks of inspiration that hit home when you least expect it. But before I go further, I would also like to declare one of the few things I actually believe in: No idea was ever original. First, I would define ideas as a combination of numerous lenses (elements) and the object of the idea in question. For example, an idea of making a flying (element) pen (object). When one is looking at the object with a particular lens and likes it, an idea is formed. By adding more lenses into the picture, the image shown to the viewer changes and if it is not what he wanted, he can just change the lenses until he is satisfied with what he wants. Now all he needs is to make other people like the same idea.
Ideas are how our mind sees. Not though sight, but thoughts.
Like I have said before, I personally believe that no idea was ever original. Let me start with a simple, personal recount of my childhood memories. I was playing soccer with my mates when inspiration in the form of a physical soccer ball struck me. An idea, a song composition, came into my head. I rushed to write it down, and the next day proudly presented it to my music teacher, who promptly shot me down, telling me it was very similar to a song written in the 1970s. I later found out years later, a sudden epiphany in my father’s car, that I was brought up listening to old English songs since birth, and that I had unconsciously taken elements, put them together to form a new idea, albeit a new combination made out of old elements.
Which brings me to my point, that no idea is ever original, and the current ideas/songs/inventions/games all incorporate some form of mimicking of certain elements (RPG games, same old classes?) and rehashed clichés. That said, having knowledge of all these elements is very, very important. After all, this knowledge is what makes up the basic foundations of an idea. But if one wants to have an idea that is different from the norm, or what they call (very cliché again) thinking out of the box, or any other object that contains things. A good idea in my opinion, a creative one, is one that successfully changes how people act and think, the way they perceive things by having the right lenses in front of their eyes and this is done simply by taking elements that share a relationship and aligning them up to form an idea that makes people go wow and saying: “Damn, I should have thought of it myself!”.
OM NOM NOM NOM
Elements that share a relationship are like cookies and milk, elements that share a connection that people see and comprehend right away. How does one make highlight the softness of silk? How does one ramp up the sex factor of a model? You can place a baby along the silk, her soft baby skin complimenting the silk’s softness. You can bare her midriff, where most men look at the most, and add shadows and soft lighting to produce a seductive atmosphere. How you let those elements work with one another is important on how the idea affects people. (You wouldn’t want to throw the model into a pit full of cobras, or hang her by the feet below a helicopter 300 feet in the air; it would be like adding a blackened lens to the mix, as people cannot see a relationship between those elements.
Dangerous Ideas
Innocent victims of a napalm attack during the Vietnam War
Haunting image of a woman living in war torn Afghanistan (National Geographic)
Man is always obsessed with perfection, as his curiosity is what compels him to explore and figure out how things work, and when they succeed, they try to tweak it to the form that is most ideal to him. That is when things start to get dangerous. Man, being a social animal, naturally developed culture and society, and different environments produce different cultures and people. But what we forget too often is that Man is also a violent being. Since our caveman days we have always resolved conflicts through violence, since it was the easiest and most effective form of problem solving, it stuck. Even now with all our grand ideas of morals and laws, violence sticks out like a sore thumb that spits in the hypocritical face of society. You see, differences among people make them suspicious of one another, and even hostile as humans treat others who are not similar very differently. A tragic, but very real example that should all serve us as a grim reminder that ideas/ideals can be, and are dangerous was the Nazi camps of World War 2.
The Nazis thought of their German race as the ultimate human race, and deemed the Jewish race as a parasitic race full of ideals that were not needed. During the war, they captured them and tortured, maimed and murdered them by the thousands inside numerous ‘death camps’. This horrific event emphasizes on Man’s violent reactions to others who do not share the same ideas, others who are deemed weak and parasitic according to their ideas. This is only one of the many cases where dangerous ideas didn’t just remain as ideas, but put forth in action, when many people gathered under a single banner and looked through the same lenses and found out that the idea was perfect and good.
Ultimately, in order to generate good ideas, you need an immense amount of elements that do not exhaust themselves, so you have to read, see and hear all kinds of media, and record them inside your brain, your vault of knowledge. File them away, organize them according to where you think they belong and take them out when deciding on a new idea. For me, the time where I think the most uninterrupted and of the better ideas is when I am on my bed at night, with no lenses in front of me but the night view through the window. It is then I can allow my thoughts to flow smoothly, letting them drift me off to sleep and into my dreams where they continue to work, piecing themselves together until the next set of lenses are ready. What I have learned about HTI so far.
References http://www.radicalacademy.com/adlerideas.htm http://www.leg.state.or.us/process.html http://advertising.suite101.com/article.cfm/what_is_an_idea http://knowledge.smu.edu.sg/article.cfm?articleid=1267 Blue Light ISBN 0-316-57098-2
"In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe."
Ideas are how our mind sees. Not though sight, but thoughts.
OM NOM NOM NOM
