A few years ago, I was watching a reality show (something I never do, but this American show was pretty interesting at the time) about small entrepreneurs that came in to pitch their innovation from all kind of fields to different investors. Max Gunawan, an architect from San Fracisco, designed a very simple and minimalistic shape changing lamp. A very fine design and concept that instantly attracted investments of over 1 milion dollars from the jury. Writing about him right now and doing a fast google search, I see that the concept is a stable company and the founder was given multiple design awards. 

When we started the discussion about possible concepts for our video visualisation of an interactive, shape changing object, this design was one of the first thing coming into my mind. I filled my team mates in and we started to discuss about it. This is something that I am most of the times concerned regarding creative thinking. We are constantly informing ourselves about the latest innovations, ground breaking technologies, new systems, new ways of drawing, new ways of creating and all of this, of course it is stored in our subconscious. When we are doing creative thinking ourselves, how much are we building on other people’s ideas? Where does actual innovation exist in a society where data transparency and availability has reached very high levels? While I steel agree you need inspiration, as Picasso would highly regard the female gender and transform them in models and muses throughout his artistic work, he became an influencer because he went out of his times. He was the first one to draw a female portrait with irregular shapes and lines that never connect in times where being able to create portraits as closer to reality as possible was one of the highest regarded ability of an artist. While I often find myself tied in the cords of my own research, my wish is to find the mind space between inspiration and outside the box thinking. 

We kept building up on ideas and we were at this stage considering designing an object for controlling the right indoor climate. We are all well aware of the positive effects on the human mind implied by creating the right environment. We were considering sound and light for main functionality and we brainstormed on the different aspects that can create our interactive object. Should it be a volume changer? A light switch?