Food as Innovation

On the past saturday we made an arduino project. Arduino is a microcontroller that allows you to control leds, motors, lcd's, speaker, etc. You can make and design a lot of things using Arduino. At first it was very difficult to work with it, because we didn't know anything about it. We needed to know about programming and also understand circuits so we could make a prototype for a social intervention. My team and I focused on the problem that in a caffeteria, students normally are indifferent to other unknown people. So we made a kind of Simon says way using arduino; this game will be on a table so you can play with a person you don't know and while doing it you will be interacting between each other. A thing I learned that day: We can do anything that we come up with, if we persist and have our goal well defined.

Today, we learned about food and how to innovate with it. Since food is a necessity, everyone buys it. So, food is a powerful material because it can be/ has been anchored, can connect people and makes them feel, share ideas, makes people feel comfortable and simple it is life by itself. Food combined with a multi-sensory experience can produce a great effect on the customer. An example are the fruit- fireworks that combines visual, smelling, and posible tasting experience; you can search it on the internet to see the people's reactions.
I leave you a mindmap that my team and I did.

That's all for today, wish you the best !

Want it? get it.

It is very helpul to go to conferences about some interesting topics like entrepenurship. While you listen to the exhibitor, you become more open-minded because you can learn from what they have done. Entrepenurs demonstrate that creating something new and making it work is not easy.But they aslo prove that if you follow your passion you can achieve anything that you come up with. You can learn from them in every aspect, they remind you that not always you are going to be at excellent moments, there are also dark moments while you are working hard to accomplish your dreams. Therefore, it is very important to have an excellent business associate to help and complement you.

Remember to chase your passion. That's all for today, I wish you the best.

Keep on the road

It is very important that when analizing a problem, we must stay focused on it. We have to define it, stablish the job to be done, make a kind of story board (so we can implement a solution easier) and of course what it is required to do it (materials). When presenting your idea/proyect to someone else, knowing to improvise can be a very helpful hand, if something goes wrong. Remember that to do something creative, that something needs to be interesting for you. That's all for today, wish you the best.

Focus Pocus

Focus... besides it is a common word, it is very important to completely understand and aply it in each situation that requires it. If we totally focus on a problem, we will forget about the fatigue that we problably have. We also tend to ignore what other people think about what we are doing if we are truly concentrated. And that's a another key for creativity; we need to try things and don't care about the thoughts of other people ( unless, they are intended to help us).

The improvisation is another important aspect that we should practice more often. It helps us focus on different tasks; why? because it requires us to involve our mind to create the scene and take it out of us, so we can visualize it.

One exercise I recommend to improve our perception of the surroundings and therefore our improvisation is the following. Find a spot where you can be comfortable and close your eyes; try to focus in every single sound and try to figure out where does it come from. You can create different types of exercises like these to devolop our concentration. Personally, it truly helped me (my teacher thought us that exercise).

Well, that's all for today.

I wish you the best.

Take what is available

It is very important that when you are analizing a situation, that you don't lose the problem/what you want to do during the process. If you keep in mind your definition of the problem, it will be easier to give different propositions of solutions.  And remember that creativity requires hard work; it is not just only a sudden insight.

Take in consideration that when doing something creative, you can use the information that is available. With this, you don't have to do a product/process you need when it is available on the internet or market. (the information to achieve the process or the tangible product).

That's all for today, I wish you the best.

Work, work and work

Being creative isn't as easy as it seems; it requires hard work.  Creativity is a process and as you probably know, it's based on having ideas/new ways of doing a thing. In order to have a way more amount of ideas of a specific area, we need to have information/knowledge about it. So yes, creativity is more common in people who are more specialized in an specific area.

If someday you want to do a social impact in a certain type of "problem"; first of all you need to completely define what you consider the problem to be. Asking questions and making analysis will help you a lot in defining a problem. You need to identify what's happening in the place you are analizing with your 7 senses; so then you can ask why's questions about the aspects that you discovered when using the senses. The results can susprise you, trust me.

One important aspect on the analysis is to consider the critical points; these are representative "expressions" that we make to demonstrate what we think or not think. A few examples: Mmmm (decision), wooow, Eureka, etc.

That's all for today, wish you the best !

We have 7 senses... USE THEM.

I'm seeing that object... I guess I know it completely. Sometimes we think that by seeing things or people we know them already; this is not true. The sight is just one of the 7 senses that we have and we usually just base our perception on it. The other 6 senses are: touch, taste, smell, hearing, intuition and kinestesy. I know that you may not be familiarized with the last two; I personally wasn't. The intuition is what you know that you don't know how you know it. The kinestesy is the movement of the matter.

To fully know and understand something, we probably need to "evaluate" it through all our senses.  We are not used to touch the walls of the streets or smelling the computers, etc. Because we are "afraid" of what people can think about us. We need to break those creativity blocks in order to improve our way we perceive the world.

In the class, we did an exercise of the above. We chose a day of the week and a situation we commonly have. Then we started to do some brainstorming about the things/people and feelings we are more exposed to in that situation. We had to do it with the different 7 senses in order to have a complete point of view.

We are planning( My team and I) in collecting some evidence of our chosen situation, so we can analize and verify the evidence with our proposed ideas.

Well, that's all for today.   Hope your are doing excellent and remember to use all your senses!