“I’m an aspiring inventor,” says May Kitt, “but my best work so far was a Fitbit attachment for my dog, so I can game the step counter. Someone beat me to the grape peeler. Where can I get some more inspiration?”
Creative geniuses all have their own tricks. Yoshiro Nakamatsu, who has 3000 inventions to his name, takes a deep breath and dives underwater. “Zero-point-five seconds before death, I visualise an invention,” he says. But you needn’t go to such extremes. My inspiration generator will bring ideas for all.
To create it, I first grabbed lists of random words, then I used Stanford University’s tool for tagging “parts of speech” like nouns and adjectives and some Excel wizardry to arrange the data. With a few lines of JavaScript – a popular web coding language – I could mix the tagged words into suitable grammatical patterns. My random idea generator was ready for action.
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“Disinheriting underpass,” it suggested cryptically, “Autosexing pie. Lasagne categorising ink.” Some of the prompts were more plausible: I would certainly buy a “gratitude showing armchair”.
Some say inspiration comes from remixing, so I replaced the word list with text from old Make columns. I also added a function to suggest a company name – combining letters from the words. The results: protect your home with WaRoo, the warning Roomba. And a rival to Uber Eats, called Urfoo – USB roving food. My style indeed.
Others say inspiration lurks where you least expect, so I built a version from articles on Gwyneth Paltrow’s offbeat lifestyle site Goop. It was no less rich. Who wouldn’t eat üfu (übermoms fuelling spread)? Especially in a Bind (beet-cheese-basil indulging brand).
How do you know if your idea is unique? My program also assesses the number of hits the word combination gets on Google and the availability of the “.com” domain for each suggestion. The text turns green if you’re good to go.
I also added an option to email my ideas to select friends. Maybe not a great idea, after almost sending “swinging services” to my boyfriend with no context. Which gave me a great idea for an email retriever…
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