Ideoeyesopen.com is about casting a wide net to find inspirational experiences in the unlikeliest of places—the things we do and see everyday. It is the digital compadre to the IDEO Eyes Open series of experiential guidebooks, now available through Chronicle Books.

Assignment: Submit your story

If you think about it, we are all a bunch of perpetual novices when it comes to starts, whether we initiate them or happen upon them. So take a few moments to document and send us examples of something that gets you going—for example, an activity or environment you might seek out to start your day.

There aren’t too many rules in the Eyes Open world, besides being willing to reflect and share. We only ask that you: choose an experience that starts your day (and note what time it occurs). Describe how it motivates you, explain how it works, and reflect upon how the experience lingers or sustains you once it’s over.

Experience the experience

In order to best describe an experience, it’s helpful to actually go out and have it. In other words, we think of experiences as active (i.e., you can’t just look at it, you have to engage with it) and situated (i.e., you have to be able to tell someone where to find it.)

Document the experience so others can get a feel for it—through photographs or multimedia—and accompany it with a brief article that captures your thinking. Ready…begin.

Next Month's Topic & Assignment:

Refresh

Such far-reaching issues as obesity, sustainability, and consumption have us all thinking about where we are heading as a global community. We are at a critical point in time as we establish collective practices for our future. Believing that social change is the collective outcome of millions of individual behavior changes over time, we felt this was a good time to explore individual pattern making and pattern breaking. In this exploration, we hope to further understand how personally inspiring experiences alter our hard-wired behaviors.

This month we’ll look to the world for examples of experiences that provided the inspiration necessary to shift an individual's existing pattern structure. We're talking about things—people, experiences, environments, and services—that motivate us to change. Inspiration that has enough influence to not only affect behaviors today, but well into the future.

Bring anything to mind? We look forward to hearing from you!

Beginnings

Aging

WNYC – The Brian Lehrer Show

aging airport anticipation beginnings boomer café children china coffee commitment community dance diner education elderly exercise experience family film friends fun gallery garage generations germany group health home london mexico mobile munich new york nourishment outdoor spaces palo alto play pride public spaces queue regulars retirement routine san francisco school seattle self-awareness senior citizen shanghai shopping silicon valley start-up take-out technology tours united states volunteer volunteering work workspace

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