Inspired by Tininess

Introduction

How do you perceive tiny things? Useless, unnoticeable, or weak?
If you have similar thoughts, you will definitely change your mind after reading this blog! In fact, tiny things can lead to great and unpredictable effects. Why? It is because EVERY EFFORT COUNTS! In this blog, we will use COINS and BUTTONS to illustrate how little things bring large impacts.


Before introducing our works of coins and buttons, we would like to share with all of you about how we come up with the ideas. We describe our thinking process as using a MIXER: putting essential ingredients, stirring, and mixing into a great work at the end. The detailed steps are as follows:
1. Putting essential ingredients – contributing valuable ideas by three of us during the brainstorming process;
2. Stirring – interacting by giving comments and opinions on each other’s ideas;
3. Mixing into a great work – combining our thoughts.
After using the mixer, we have decided our materials – coins and buttons – inspired by their small sizes. And using them, we are going to tell you a story: Every effort counts. Coins will demonstrate the individual effort while buttons will show the collective effort. Let’s develop your new perception of tininess by reading our works!

What a little coin can do, instead of buying things?

1. Making decisions with 2 choices

This is not new to you. When you find it difficult to make decisions between 2 options, you can use a coin to help you make a decision. For example, you can choose to have Chinese food or Japanese food as your lunch by tossing a coin. A coin has two sides, number side and face side. You will choose either Chinese food or Japanese food depending on which side you see as it falls on your hand.

2. As a Wobble Wedge

A coin helps stabilize tables and chairs. If you find a chair shaking when sitting on it, you can place coins on one of its leg (which is shorter than the others) to stabilize it.

3. Making a wish

In many countries, people throw coins to make a wish such as in Japan, China or Rome. People make a wish by throwing a coin onto a turtle in China, or throwing coins into a fountain in Rome to make a wish. Can you guess how many people throw coins into the Rome's Trevi fountain? There is no statistic on this information, but the Rome's Trevi fountain provides $ 600, 000 euro revenue to the Rome government per year. *1

4. Removing the iron plant

You will find there is some plant on the lucky-draw card that you need to remove so as to know what's underneath. Anyway, you cannot do it by your bare hand. It will be easier for you to use a coin to remove the plant.

5. Openning the lock

Some locks can be unlocked by a coin, like a toilet lock. If a washroom is accidently locked, you can use a coin to open it.

6. Hitting the fire alarm

If you hit the glass of the fire alarm by your bare hand, you will probably get hurt. A coin can help you to break the fire alarm without hurting your hand.

7. Covering a hole

If you find a hole, for example a hole on the wall, you can stick a coin to cover it.

8. Magic

Obviously, there are much magic related to coins. Coin is a common tool for magic, like becoming the object going to be disappeared.

9. As a Weapon

You can put many coins into a shock and it can be transform to a weapon. Once you place the coins in the shock, you can beat your enemies.

10. As a “pen” to write memo

If you want to write down something important but you do not get a pen, you can scrape a coin on the paper.




We think both coins and buttons are tiny, and seem worthless to people. But we see that people can have different perspectives on coins, and have used it in so many ways beside its basic function. It really inspires us to create other uses in a similar objective, buttons.

1. Button-pen

We can insert ink parcel into the holes of the buttons. While some buttons have 2 holes, some have four. We use a 2-hole button and insert 2 different colors of ink parcel in it. See, it is going to be a 2-color pen.





2. Button-bag

We try to use the some plastic wire and buttons to decorate a bag. We use some wires, two types of buttons to make this bag. We think that buttons should not only appear on clothes so we place them on a bad. It is not only a bag, it also is your accessory.





3. Buttle (Button & Bottle)

We stack up buttons to form a bottle. It performs as a bottle. Any pens to put inside?











4. Robot

We use buttons to build a robot. It’s fun!












5. Photo frame

We use buttons as decorations for a photo frame.

6. Cup mat

We put buttons as a rectangular shape for putting hot drinks on it.

7. Canon

We use buttons to build a canon. It can even shoot!

8. Filter

We weave the buttons and form a filter which can sieve things through the holes.

9. Memo holder

By sticking the buttons altogether, it becomes a memo holder. You can place any memos and photos on it.

Individual thinking and inspiration and group processes

We have a lot of ideas. However, it is more important to know how we generate the ideas. Here is the process. Firstly, we started by individual thinking. When our team tried to think of the materials to use, we dreamed on our own. We were inspired by anything without any limitation. Then, we came to anecdote circle*2. Our group sat together and shared our own stories. During the sharing section, we gave feedbacks and added new ideas to others’ stories immediately. We called this process as “stirring”. That is when one idea came out, we discussed on it and generated more ideas. As it was a continuous process, more and more ideas were stirred up.

Moreover, you might wonder how we further develop our creativity journal from the inspirations, that is the collection of ideas and things that inspired us *3. Our group thought that, life is the origin of creativity, creativity came up from our living. We started to brainstorm ideas from life situations. For example, people always face tradeoff, this led us to think of the two sides of a coin and got one use of decision-making. Also, human beings are weak, compared to other animals in the world. Then we thought that we could make use of the hardness of the coins to help us in our life, such as breaking the fire alarm glass.

After that, we started to work on existing ideas and thought continuously. That is to build new and similar ideas on the existing ones. For example, the hardness of coins could have more uses. We then came up with the use of opening a lock. This was useful to think continuously and get more similar ideas.

Besides, we also tried to think oppositely in order to break the boundaries and produce more ideas. Our group once came up with an idea that "circle is perfect", but the holes on the buttons mark an incompleteness to a perfect circle. However, can incompleteness create room for creativity? As we think in this way, we created the filter using the buttons. We considered the holes of buttons to be an advantage in this case.

By repeating group thinking process, we developed the above ideas of different uses and objects.

Enablers and Inhibitors

When we are creating the objects by buttons and thinking of the different uses of the coins, we have some enablers, which facilitate our thinking process and also some inhibitors, which limit our creativity and innovation.

For enablers, the group itself is a good enabler. Many feathers make a bed. If we group all the ideas together, they can be formed as a bigger piece of work. An individual has creative ideas, a group can produce more. If an individual idea is not complete, a group can make it better. For example, one of our teammates pointed out that we can make use of the holes of the buttons to build the object. Other teammates kept stirring up the ideas and finally built the filter. This is how a group can enable the creativity process.

On the other hand, there are inhibitors. For example, we were restricted because of the original uses of the objects. The buttons are used on clothes - this is a normal way of thinking among all of us. When we built the objects, we always thought about the clothes and could not get rid of it. This took us times to break the boundaries and think of different possible objects can be built. However, this situation has improved as we built the first object - we could already break through the boundaries and think beyond the normal ways *4.

Financial constraint is another inhibitor. As our group uses the buttons to build the objects, we have to use some buttons as our materials. Buying the buttons became a problem to us. Since we did not purchase massively, the unit price of the buttons were quite high. If we purchase massively, we cannot afford the total cost. More importantly, we had only three teammates to share the costs. As a result, restricted by our budget, we could only purchase a few buttons with limited styles, sizes and colors. This limited our creative ideas to be materialized.


Our selection process

In our group thinking process, there were many ideas generated. By selection, we have rejected some of our ideas. For example, when we thought about the cohesive story of our blog, we thought of the "Strengths comes from Cohesion". However, we did not adopt this idea because it is hard for us to think of many uses which require us to joining the coins together.

Conclusion

Indeed, every effort counts. Apart from the ordinary use, coins have more potential uses than we usually think; buttons can form great works beyond our imagination. Similarly, every one of us has own strengths and certainly we have a lot more potential competence; on the other hand, as we co-operate with each other, synergy effect can be resulted. Although we come across obstacles in the meantime, problems become easier to be solved when we bring our thoughts to the group. This is the power of a MIXER.

References
*1. Unknown. (2005). The Passage Of A Trevi Fountain Coin. Retrieved November 3, 2009, from http://www.life.com/image/56289752

*2. Kathleen M. (2006). Business Narrative: Story Listening and Story Telling in Organization. 1-12

*3. Maruin B. E. (Unknown). Keeping a Painting Creative Journal. What should you put in a creativity journal and why should you make one? Retrieved October 23, 2009, from http://painting.about.com/cs/inspiration/a/paintingjournal.htm

*4. Jonathan, H. (2006) Creativity: What is it? Retrieved October 23, 2009, from http://www.icecreativity.com/Creativity-WhatIsIt.htm

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First of all, thank you for all your comments. Your comments do serve as the enablers for creativity too. It is because there are much more ideas that we have not come up with. The comments are also our motives to work better as I know all of you really put efforts in making comments. Responding to the your comments, our group has made this revision into four parts.

Firstly, we see many comments questioning about the feasibility of the uses and objects in real life. If you guys have read our first blog, you will notice that we have differentiated creativity from innovation. Creativity is not necessarily practical as innovation. You may refer back to our first blog and we are not going to further elaborate it here. The main point we want to share is that "don't restrict the traditional thinking!" We believe when Edison was inventing the light bulb, every one said, "Why don't we just use the candle? It is good enough!" However, if there is no such creative idea from Edison, we have no lighting today. Yes, we know that it is always the minority to come up with creative ideas which the majority bans. However, sometimes, a sound-like non-practical idea can actually be practical after further improvements. We appreciate your suggestions to modify our ideas. This is the process of changing creativity into innovation and it is also an extension of group thinking. This should be a good opportunity for creativity.

Second, we want to point out that most of our ideas are practical. For example, using the coin to hit the fire alarm glass is really usable. If you know the design of the fire alarm, you should know that, for safety purpose, glass is easily breakable by just using your finger to add pressure to the white spot. Our design is to protect your finger not to get hurt only. In case all of you don't know about that, we want to tell you this safety measure. Moreover, some of you suggest we can simply use our shoes to break the glass. However, not everyone wears high-heel shoes, and perhaps, even some of them wear slippers. Normal shoes and slippers are too large which actually reduce the pressure when hitting the alarm (according to basic physics theory). At that point, a coin would be something handy and hard enough object to generate great pressure.



For the idea of button pen, buttons are in many different sizes, we do find the buttons with the big-enough-hole size. However, if we merely purchase six to seven of them, it costs $5 each. We thought it was too expensive therefore we refused to buy. You can simply insert the ink parcel in the hole and it works as a pen, you can change the color so easily by just inserting ink parcel with different colors.


There are more feasible ideas, but it will make the revision too long. So we just pick one from the uses and objects. If you are really interested in any product or use, do contact our group during lesson and we are glad to further explain it to you. As we have mentioned earlier, we welcome discussion to make a creative ideas innovative. =]

Thirdly, some of you suggested that we should collect buttons instead of buying to eliminate the financial constraints. Our group loves to collect the buttons, yet owing to the time constraint, it is hard for us to collect enough buttons to build the objects. Just like the robot, we were actually building it, but because of inadequate buttons, we cannot finish it. However, we did have used some collected buttons. The materials we used for the photo frame are not purchased but collected by ourselves.

Lastly, for the comment from Keung, we are quite sad to see this piece of comment. When our group worked on this project, we did not think of the grade at all. The process itself is so interesting and worth learning. If people really aimed at the high grade and did this as the normal assignment, I am sorry that you cannot get much from this course. This is because you limited your works and learning to only a grade. Possibly it may be your aim but to us, this is a great inhibitor to creativity.

Thanks for reading our blog again and hope you can get something from it.