A fun way to exercise your creative abilities is to think of new uses for things. This is also a way to innovate and invent new products. It’s way to save money too. Ever use chairs for saw horses or milk crates for furniture? Here are some examples from my own life to get you thinking.
I worked in fast food early in life, and I hated to see those strong cardboard boxes that the cups came in thrown away. They were large, and had a (more…)
Here are two more random ideas that I have been playing with, starting with an invention idea for insect control.
The Bug Vacuum
I was once in a Bonanza Restaurant in the upper peninsula of Michigan, and they actually had a “bug zapper” inside. It’s distasteful enough to have listen to insects being electrocuted outside on a patio, and to have a pile of dead bug bodies below the zapper, but inside a restaurant? In any case, I recalled this the other day and it got me thinking about what kind of devices could be used to control flies and other flying insects inside buildings.
The “Bug Vacuum” would be a relatively simple device that detects an insect near the entrance and then (more…)
The other day I was checking out some of the recent inventions involving bicycles in a magazine. I’ll tell you about a few of them in a moment. It occurred to me that there are almost endless ways to use bicycles and the related technologies to innovate and invent new devices. In fact, I have had many of my own ideas for inventions for or involving bikes, and I use bicycles for examples when explaining how to use certain problem solving techniques.
Anyhow, here is some of what I found (more…)
As you may recall, I promised to occasionally report on new ideas and products in the world. Well, I have recently read about some more innovations. The first is from Silver Spring Networks, a company that makes and installs electricity monitoring devices.
Their new electric meters do several things differently. For example, they can set up displays in houses or buildings to tell customers when electric rates are highest, so they cut back at these times. This not only saves the customer money, but in helps redistribute electricity use so that new electric plants don’t have to be built just to handle (more…)
(Stories From The Cabin - Part Five)
As mentioned in the last one of these “stories from the cabin,” I liked to play with kites. I also liked to look at ways to harness the wind in general. As children we were amazed at the strength of the wind on the beach. Two of us would each hold corners of a blanket in each hand and see if we could then stand against the force of the wind. I think we even tried a “blanket sail” on a bicycle, to propel us down the gravel road in front of the beach.
Later in life I lived alone in the cabin, and I wanted a way to expend less energy than usual getting around in the old (more…)
(Stories From The Cabin - Part Four)
My kite ideas (and the kites I made) were mostly for entertainment. I was living in a cabin on Lake Michigan as a young man. I used garbage bags, old yardsticks, and tape of whatever sort was available to make the kites - I didn’t have the money for better supplies, and there were no stores around nor did I have a car to get to one. Heavy duty fish line was all I had for for kite string.
Delta-wink kites seemed to work best. In fact they continued to fly even after (more…)
(Stories From The Cabin - Part Three)
One way to have more creative ideas is to understand the principles involved in things and apply them in new ways.
The water was gushing out of the eight-foot-high culvert by the little cabin I lived in, because it was the height of the spring snowmelt. I was nineteen and always looking for a bit of adventure. Although there were a few snowflakes in the air, it seemed like there must be some way to have fun in that torrent of water…
“Why not water ski (more…)
(Stories From The Cabin - Part Two)
They say that necessity is the mother of invention. My creative tinkering at seventeen-years-old may have looked more like laziness. Having strings hanging above the couch where I slept - I lived alone in a cabin - meant I could stay under the covers all day while turning on lights, the radio and television with a quick pull. But the reason for the various contraptions was not my desire to relax. It was that it was too cold to get out of bed.
In fact, the refrigerator had been off for weeks, since the food (more…)
A fun way to exercise your creative abilities is to think of new uses for things. This is also a way to innovate and invent new products. It’s way to save money too. Ever use chairs for saw horses or milk crates for furniture? Here are some examples from my own life to get you thinking.I worked in fast food early in life, and I hated to see those strong cardboard boxes that the cups came in thrown away. They were (more…)
(Stories From The Cabin - Part One)
Innovation on paper or in one’s mind is fun, but experimentation is what most often produces the best ideas and makes them useful.
When I was a young man I lived in a cabin in Northern Michigan. White cedars were the most common trees. They are the lightest wood in the area, weighing less than half of what a maple tree of the same size would weigh. When they grow in swampy areas they often are very thin, and when they dry they are relatively stiff. They would be perfect, I decided, for making my own stilts. (more…)
