a design exercise

ok - so you are stuck for ideas...
The problem here is that you do not have the time to get stuck - so you need to get over your stuckness!

so here is an exercise to get you thinking.
1. get a camera (digital)
2. set aside a couple of hours
3. go for a walk in a high denisty residential area (inner city suburb)
4. look for instances of people "fixing" things with other things.
eg.) car wheels bolted to walls for garden hoses to be stored, coat hanger car arials etc
5. photograph every instance (no matter how bizzaar or boring) once and find as many as you can.
6. pull all of these photos into some sort of grid (a 9x9 square matrix works well = 81 photos)
7. print out the matrix and start looking for patterns, methods, materials etc.
8. if you do not have at least 10 new ideas form doing this in a two hour period than you are not utilising your creativity - so force yourself to think - quicky sketch the idea on an A4 page.
9. spread all of your A4 concepts out on the floor and in your mind transplant the idea into a 'high design context" -
10. discard ideas that either simply don't cut it - or those those that easilly fit in that context /market (these will be predictable -and therfore won't work)
11. further develop the ideas that you are unsure about
12. illustrate them
13. apply a material that has some relationship / contrast to the application
14. go looking for that material
15. make it

good luck