At the end of the day, it's all about ideas.

"That's a good idea." "That's a bad idea." "Do you have any idea what you're letting yourself in for?" "I had no idea she was your wife, your honour"

If ideas are so important to us, especially as creatives, then why does it always seem that they come to us just before we fall asleep? Or in the bath? Or in the pub (when quitting your job and starting a metal band is the BEST idea you've ever come up with)? What we need is a system to come up with ideas, both good and bad, and we can then filter them.

In a recent class session we tried to do this with our "50 ideas in 50 minutes" experiment. All we did was think about some of the relevant technologies that we had discussed previously (HTML5, Augmented reality, API, The cloud...), and also about things in everyday life that annoy us. Then all we had to do was come up with ideas, "I wish this existed" kind of ideas, and then tweet them with the hashtag #50x50. Tweeting the ideas forced us to keep them short, because the enemy of an idea is overthinking. Once you start to think too much about it then you start to analyse whether it is a good or bad idea. For now, this was not our concern, the ideas can be filtered at a later date.

In the end we came up with 60 ideas in 42 minutes. Not bad going. Some of these included: An augmented reality Tony Hawk skate game, paying for petrol using a QR code, a virtual "when I'm at home" schedule for the postman, an ebook printing service, a social network for academic writing.

Some ideas were good, some were jokes, some were a bit of fun, some were terrible, and some actually could work. I'd say at least half of the ideas warranted further exploration. As a method of idea creation, this was a success.

You can read Jon's full account of how we carried out this class, and the full list of ideas here