Idea 10: “In-the-meme-time” braces – a meme in the making

Meme (noun) – a pervasive thought or thought pattern that replicates itself via cultural means

There are different theories for how a meme is created. Whilst on a walk-and-talk, organized by one of my friends, the question was asked whether or not a meme could be actively created and soon the challenge was laid down. I was to try and create a fashion meme from scratch with the creative assistance and advice of those endowed with more technical design skills than myself. We are then to document its creation, growth and (hopefully) the spread of an intentionally created meme.

Fact: Your favourite pieces of clothing are those that are well worn. The pieces of clothing that define you are the ones you remove from the charity bag behind your partner’s back, arguing for their rightful place on your easiest to reach shelf.

That faded pair of jeans with a hole in the crotch becomes the incarnation of comfort, familiarity and nostalgia for many. That for me is the allure of vintage clothing – someone else wearing clothes up to level “worn in” and you then taking it from there.

Another quality of vintage clothes is that they hold a story. Just the process of buying “vintage” leads to a post-buy conversation that could never be matched had it been bought from a high street chain.

It is this “story” associated to vintage clothes that I am aiming to capture. I picked braces for the following reasons:

• Braces are easily recognisable – no point starting an underwear meme as testing for it would be quite complicated!
• Braces are humorous – the idea of getting people to wear them makes me smile.
• Braces are typically seen as “uncool” – turning this image around without re-designing the braces will be a challenge in itself.
•  People do not mind sharing braces – a key characteristic for my idea to succeed.

So how will people interact with the braces?

• A tag with a unique code will be stitched to each pair of braces.
• This unique code can then be used to log a story about the braces on a community website.
• Stories are posted / tweeted / liked using the tried and tested channels of social media.
• As the braces are shared / sold / gifted, the stories remain with them and are added to by each new owner.
• As the number of stories attached to a pair of braces increase, so does the intrinsic value of the braces.

Where are we with this at the moment?

Twelve pairs of braces have arrived in various shapes and colours – some prettier than others. The next steps will be to get labels printed, packaging sorted out, a decent looking website created and then getting the “word out on the street”.

The most exiting aspect for me is to see what kind of stories people come up with. Should we ask them to state whether it is fact or fiction? Or, should we let readers enjoy a bit of mystery? These are all details that will be sorted as we go along. Most of all, it will be fun.

Idea 9: Crowdsource the knowledge to ride solo with a motorcycle from London to Cape Town

It has been something I wanted to do for a very long time - a solo trip from London to Cape Town on a motorcycle.


In April 2011, I bought an Africa Twin and is currently using it to commute around London - a bit of an insult to the motorcycle, given what it is capable of.

It is always easy to find excuses for not doing the things we dream of. Finding excuses not to ride the length of Africa on your own, maybe even easier.

The excuses can be broadly categorised into:

1. Money - "It's too expensive"/ "Do you know how much it will cost?!" 

2. Time - "How can you get 6 months off work?"

3. Danger - "Half of African countries have some kind of conflict" / "Are you crazy?!" 

4. Capability - "What do you know about riding?" / "What happens if it breaks?"

The first two I can plan for, the third I can shrug of with a philosophical "we are all going to die" but the 4th will need a bit more effort. Given that I know nothing about motorcycle mechanics and little about adventure riding, I will address this problem as follows:

Idea 9 - Crowdsourcing the knowledge needed:

Start a blog to capture everything I learn. This can then be used by other enthusiasts wanting to do the same, help document my story and serve as a guide to keep me focused.

The information contained in the blog will be completely crowdsourced from individuals that have more knowledge on the topic than I do. These individuals can be found on motorcycle forums like http://www.xrv.org.uk and http://www.advrider.com/. Forums like these are treasure troves of knowledge and advice.

The blog will mainly be a "how-to" guide, broken down into a series of episodes. Each episode covering a very specific topic e.g., learning to get the bike onto the centre stand, changing a tyre, all the way through to sorting out visas and getting insurance.

I hope to find voluntary "mentors" on-line, willing to teach me specific skills. The format of each episode will be these "mentors", teaching me this skill and maybe ending with a story they have related to riding.

There is a lot of information scattered about on the topic of motorcycle travel but I wish to tell my story like every story should be told - from the beginning.




Update 1 Feb 2012
I did a basic Motorcycle maintenance course with Oval Motorcycle Centre last night.
They were absolutely brilliant and just the advice I got over the two tea breaks, were probably worth more than the £35 I paid for the course. It just got me excited again about pulling my finger in regards to my motorcycling. 

Why such a dry spell?

Funny thing, making your ideas public. As I said in my first post, I had no idea where this blog will lead me or how long it will last. It just felt right at the time and it still feels right. I had positive feedback from friends and one guy is now writing three songs a day! What a compliment.


I have been beating myself up a bit for being "out of ideas" to put on this blog until a friend remarked that it might be all for a good reason. I am working on two ideas that I think might have legs and it is strange, but it feels that the part of your brain thinking about ideas and the part actioning ideas are mutually exclusive.


Given that my "give away idea" part of thinking is now wrestling with my "doing stuff" part , I'll also be including posts on the latter as time goes by.


The next post is something I have been dreaming about for a very long time. The dreaming stops now.

The knock on effect of an idea. Here is the story of a modest charity collection – told backwards.

Our team collected more than £800 for the Movember initiative, benefiting various charities related to men’s cancers.

The majority of people at work donated money and all of them seemed to be doing so with a smile. We had many comments about our various styles of moustaches – all good hearted and I do believe the whole campaign contributed, in a small way, to office spirit.

A colleague of mine ordered the official Movember collection box and we had a manual collection in addition to the donations we received online.

Pictures of our moustaches were published in the staff magazine and also put on all internal television screens – all to the amusement of less hairy-lipped staff.

I asked a member of our communications team if she could help us to raise some awareness to see if we could collect money for the charity.

More and more colleagues started to sport a moustache and as the collective hair on our lips grew, so did the general awareness of why we were doing it.

A small group of colleagues committed to join me and grow a moustache for the whole month of November after I sold it to them as a novelty and a charitable endeavour.

I decided that since I always wanted to have a moustache, this was the perfect excuse to grow one. And if we received some money, I would be able to justify the hair on my face to my girlfriend and other skeptics under the guise of it being for charity. The perfect cover!

I received a general email directed to some of the men in the office, jokingly suggesting that we participate in the Movember initiative as the sender liked moustaches and would not mind a couple of “Tom Selleck” look-alikes roaming the office for a month.

A colleague of mine read a small article in a magazine about jewelry in the shape of moustaches and that the company selling it planned to donate part of their profit to the Movember cause.

 -------------------------

 Thank you Debbie, because of your small spark, we collected £800 in charitable donations, contributed to a spirit of wellbeing in the office, suffered some well intended ridicule and forfeited the odd bit of “leg-over” due to our partners not being as impressed with our “taches” as we were, but it was for a good cause and a lot of fun. Well done.

Idea 8: Rate your local sex appeal

When I started to ask people about the following idea, there were various opinions about the statistical validity*, how many people you will need to make it work, blah blah blah. But, one thing that there is consensus about is that most people play this game in their heads anyway.

Idea number 8 - Rate your local sex appeal:

The premise of the game is to rate the sex appeal of strangers in an area, using a mobile application.

Under your profile you would enter your gender, age and whether you are straight or gay.

The interface of the mobile application will be simple.

• Two voting buttons; "Would you?" or "wouldn't you?"
• A countdown timer; Users can choose to play for 3, 5 or 10 minutes.
• The amount of alcohol (in units) consumed at the time when the game is played.

There will need to be some controls to ensure the parameters entered are statistically reliable*, of which the key ones to get right will be; (examples at the hand of a heterosexual woman)

• Dismissing scores when the location is too quiet (think deserted island). A score of 1 out of 4 means you only saw 4 men of which you found 1 sexually appealing - too few to base a statistic on.
• Dismissing scores when the location is too busy (think clubbing night). A ridiculously high total scoring means you are seeing too many men at the same time so you might be double counting or not counting all men.

Once you have played it a couple of time you would be able to;

• Compare your own scores, over time, against location - see where are the most attractive people, according to you. 
• See correlations between your scores, alcohol consumption and the time of day.

Once enough people are playing the game, you would be able to;

• Compare your scores to other people's in a given area to decide if you are "picky" or "desperate".
• See infographical "hotspots" in your city or town.
• See how alcohol consumption and time of day influences average scores (testing the Beer goggle theory!)

You can then post your scores and results, like everything else, to Twitter or Facebook.

I am well aware that douchebags and jocks will abuse such an app to a certain degree, but it should not be developed with them as the primary market.

Your thoughts?

* Someone mentioned that you might be muddling the statistical significance by measuring two things at the same time - the player's taste and actual sex appeal of the subjects. 

Idea 7: Guerilla paparazzi photo essay

Photo Credit: IziSmile

Overall, the public generally agrees that the phone hacking scandal that broke recently was overstepping the ever-fading line in the sand about what is deemed acceptable as far as privacy is concerned and so on and so forth.

Some argue that celebrities are in some ways public property due to the nature of what they do. I disagree. Someone needs to make the public feel just how ridiculous all of this cellulite-spotting really is.

Enter idea number seven….

You will need:

• Two photographers.
• Members of the public
• Guts, as you might be punched in the face.

The 1^st photographer will approach random people in various places as if they were celebrities and just start clicking away in an unannounced frenzy. Close ups, “up-skirt” photos, pictures of their children – anything goes.

There will be different reactions to this. This is where the 2^nd photographer comes into play. The 2^nd photographer will be capturing the unfolding of the scene caused be the 1^st photographer and his guerilla paparazzi assault on members of the public.

After the whole debacle, the subject of the photo ambush will be handed a card with a link to a website where he or she can then view the pictures taken. He/she will be asked to write a short bit about how this whole experience made them feel and if they think the way we treat celebrities for the sake of our own cheap entertainment is justified.

The photos of both photographers and the answers submitted by the subjects can form the basis of an exhibition to investigate our asphyxiation with celebrity.

Your thoughts?

Idea 6: Changing your Facebook birthday to launch your blog

On my birthday this year, I had 72 birthday wishes. That is about 15% of the 492 friends I have on Facebook. 
I did a quick search and it is close to the 17% mentioned in Can Facebook Birthday Wishes Control Your Mind?


This made me think...


The idea is as follows:

• Change your birthday on Facebook to a Wednesday (apparently the busiest day on Facebook)
• Post as your status that this is not your birthday but an experiment in launching your blog / product / service / website / whatever, along with a link.
• Ensure you can track how many people visit your site using Google Analytics or similar software.
• A couple of ratios that will be interesting:
• Number of Birthday wishes: Number of friends (Do they not read your status before they post?!)
• Number of visits to blog: Number of friends
• Number of friend requests in follwoing 7 days

It might seem like a cheecky way to launch something but they are your friends, they will forgive you.

Please let me know the stats above once you tried this as well as any other interesting measures you came across.