A few months ago, I tried to go blind for a day, although I had the idea at about six in the evening. Still, going blind for a few hours is difficult if you aren’t asleep. The lowlight of my particular experience was taking a nightmarish shower during which a rat jumped on my back disguised as the feeling of a loofah that usually hangs from a hook on the wall. After the shower, I spent most of my time reflecting on what it is like to keep your eyes closed for more than a few minutes, the chief feeling I noticed being just eyelid strain. A largely fruitless experience.

I’ll go blind again for a full day when I pluck up the courage to venture around Shanghai using only my weaker senses. Or perhaps I’ll wait until I’m in a country where the attitude to pneumatic drilling isn’t so…relaxed…  Still, it will be a largely masochistic endeavour – not the kind of thing that’ll make anybody feel any better, not me, nor blind people, nor you. It’s a far cry from the standard of social enterprise ideas that made this blog famous…

Perhaps wiser to spend more time on a social enterprise idea that legitimises stumbling around a field in a state of sensory confusion to the sounds of the Killers? How about the greatest social enterprise idea yet to grace these pages? How about…

Idea #18: Blind music festival

Organise a music festival in support of the blind.

Ah ha, but there’s more…

The key idea is that everyone must wear a blindfold – i.e. both those who can normally see, and those who can’t. Registered blind people get free tickets; everyone else has to pay. You could make a poster like this (but a nicer version, with genuine raised braille bits please!):

Why is this a great social enterprise idea? It would be

1. a tremendous show of solidarity between the sighted and blind communities.
2. a unique environment where blind people could cease to feel disabled for a while (they’d even have the upper hand, as they are used to being blind!)
3. an enlightening experience for those who can normally see, raising awareness and probably giving people a better (or at least different) experience of music. This is how dark restaurants get their appeal, right?
4. an easy way to raise money!
5. a barrel of hearty laughs

"Has anyone seen my shoe?"

There are loads of variations on the theme of a blind music festival, but the paper-thin attention span you sport and/or your growing irritation at the screenreader’s robot voice has forced me to reduce it all to a series of points:

Blindfold bands – Bands could also be required to wear blindfolds, giving them a chance to really show off their talent.

No peeking! – How are we going to make sure people don’t take a sly peek, thus ruining everything for everyone? Perhaps hold the festival in an indoor arena in the dark? Or just have loads of Peek Police patrolling and throwing people out? Have sirens attached to the blindfolds that blare painfully in the offender’s ear if they lift their blindfold? Or just trust people?

Security – To you and I it just sounds like a jolly good time, but enterprising scumbags see past this to an orgy of pickpocketing opportunities and rape. So let’s not make the security guards wear blindfolds, ok? I’m sure the blind people won’t object either.

Market – There are around 150,000 blind people in the UK. Get even 50,000 of them on board, plus another 50,000 of your regulars, and you’re bigger than the Reading festival. Use a lot of radio adverts.

If you’re interested in organising this, why not contact me and we’ll see if we can find some other people (Bono) to do the work.

Don’t feel ready to jump in to the sex-crazed world of music festival organising? Click here to donate to the RNIB (UK) or email volunteering@rnib.org.uk to volunteer for a few hours.

He's getting the idea...

To celebrate the milestone of reaching Idea #10, I’ve had a team of global allies in this enemyless war of ideas advertise the post on banknotes with the denomination of 10:

From Sunny Scotland; released in St. Andrews

From my motherland; released in Surrey

The exception that proves the rule; released somewhere in Holland (it's not that big)

Is this risky? Released in Shanghai anyway

(We’re still awaiting a picture of the US offering, although it may already be in circulation around San Francisco.)

I got inspiration for this idea – to advertise on money – from the highly recommendable book 365 Ways to Change the World by Michael Norton (as featured on the Ideas Exist Bookshelf). There, the idea proposed is to write a provocative fact on the banknote in order to promote a social cause. Ok, so I’ve made the idea a little more self-serving, but I want to investigate how effective advertising on banknotes really is, by directing recipients of the money to this page.

Anyway, just so I’m doing my bit to change the world, here are the suggestions for messages from the book plus links to relevant sites:

• 842 million people across the world will go to bed hungry  tonight.
• Guns kill 34,000 Americans every year.
• Wear a condom. Today 14,000 people will become infected with HIV/AIDS.
• One in five women experience rape or attempted rape in their lifetime. [Makes this anti-rape jacket  look like a good investment.]
• Perform a random act of kindness today.
• Give this money to someone who really needs it.
• Make amends to someone. Say sorry.
• Spread a little happiness. Smile at a stranger.

Given the amount of hands money passes through, using it was a way to advertise websites could be quite effective. Let’s just hope the people who daily spam this website don’t catch on or we’ll be forever dealing in notes covered in adverts for Russian Xanax. Ah well, the end of money  is nigh, anyway.

If you want to take part in this experiment, just send me a pic of a note like those above and I’ll put it on the site with a link to you.

Remember! If you got this address off a banknote, please leave a comment to let us know you were here! Let’s try to track where they go. I’ll put a map up if we get enough people. A map!

Here’s a classic idea that blends the technology of Idea #7: Fab Labs, the style of Idea #3: Poor models and the documentariness of Idea #4: Big Tribal Brother.

As we are aware, Pimp My Ride is about turning losers’ cars into the kind of gimmicky, pimpy rides driven by richer losers who spend all their time driving around in their flatulent rides thinking they are pimp, or rather knowing they are pimp, because they are in fact pimps, and pimping was one of the illicit means by which they obtained the money to fill the inside of their cars with Playstations.

Wouldn't it be better if this was a village?

You took the words right out of my gold-grilled mouth: Rather than pimping shit cars, wouldn’t it be better to pimp shit villages?

Idea #9: Pimp My Village:

1. Create a series of documentary video shorts on villages with a way-less-than-pimp standard of living. (Featuring villages that are regularly the victim of sex trafficking swipes would be a nice touch.)
2. Create a website to feature the videos – preferably also get them on MTV.
3. Using a nice Web 2.0 interface, viewers can pimp the villages themselves à la Pimp My Ride online Ride Pimper and Idea #5: Design your own bar. (more below)
4. Make a before and after film of the pimping, à la Pimp My Ride TV show.

What’s all this about a nice Web 2.0 interface? First have a look at MTV’s clever Ride Pimper:

Look at them wheels!

Now imagine the pimp flames, pimp air sock et al. were replaced with, say, pieces of pimp farming equipment, pimp water pumps, mosquito nets. Condoms. Mobile phones. And instead of a car, there’s a village.

You can sign up and credit a bit of money to your account. Better still, MTV credits the money out of their budget. Then you get pimping!

Select a villager you saw featured in the documentary – he was complaining about not having enough medicine to deal with his AIDS – drag a bottle across and put it in his hand, done!

Pimp my terminal illness

Select a school that’s empty of books – drag a book across, it’s as easy as putting a skull on the front of your Cadillac, but it actually really does something!

Pimp My Village is the next step on from charities like Jolkona and Kiva, which already make the effects of donations tangible by allowing donations that target a particular problem, area or person. What Pimp My Village does is makes the whole process just like handing someone something across the room: “Here’s a hand-plough” – Pimped!

This classic idea was submitted by Ezra Kwong. Mr Kwong, you are destined for great things.

P.s. You can pimp a man’s village one day, but if you give him the tools he needs to pimp his own village, he can pimp it himself, over and over again. Like the sound of that? Get involved with Project #1: Buy a Fab Lab

Last week I posted about Fab Labs and why they are such a great idea. To my ecstasy, it received four comments (inc. one from me) – the first post in the explosive short life of this blog of ideas to receive such a monumental response.

But this blog is about action, not mere volume of words, so to celebrate the success of the Fab Lab post I’ve cooked up the first wild and unlikely project…

Project #1: Buy a Fab Lab

I’ve put up the following pledge on PledgeBank.com:

So, basically, if you think it would be a cool project to chip in $200 with 100 other random people and buy a Fab Lab for Christmas, follow these steps:

1. Sign the pledge.
2. Get other people to sign.
3. Once 100 people have signed, we arrange a safe way to collect the money.
4. We vote on where to put the Fab Lab (e.g. a school in Mongolia).
5. Maybe some of us take a trip there to see it set up, make great inventions for a couple of weeks and have parties.

The main idea, as I wrote in the Fab Labs post, is that a Fab Lab in an underpriviledged community can help locals innovate solutions to their problems and create spin-off business opportunities.

A reasonable thing to buy for $200, is it not? Especially if we get to play with it whenever we want!

Imagine if you could do that for anything you wanted.

Like the idea? You need a Fab Lab.

A mobile FabLab (thanks to Matt at No-retro.com)

The Fab Lab – fabrication laboratory - is a concept developed by Neil Gershenfeld of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. (Have a look at Neil Gershenfeld’s TED talk here, if you can handle his 900 mph jargon bursts.)

Basically, a Fab Lab is a room full of computers and machine tools just like those used in industry, which enables people to make more or less anything they need. Typically, a Fab Lab will include:

	Design Tools CAD/CAM Linux-based software bank Web and CMS for websites
	Tools to design and make circuits and microcontrollers
	Moulding machines Injection moulding Vacuum forming Wax moulding
	Cutting machines Lathes Routers CNC machines Laser cutters Vinyl cutters Waterjet cutters
	2D and 3D printers

(Details and prices of all machines at http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/fab/inv.html) 

But here’s the curious thing… Are you ready? A complete Fab Lab only costs about $20,000.

Imagine, you can make anything you want. Need a solar panel for your house? Done. Wireless antennae to keep track of your reindeer? Norwegian herders beat you to it using their Fab Lab. Or do you just want to make a circuit board for… something? Easy! This 8-year-old from Ghana did it:

Valentina Kofi - just an ordinary girl with access to industrial tools

Well, I don’t know about you, but as soon as I get my hands on $20,000 I shall be installing a Fab Lab in my caravan. Think of the potential ideas:

1. Have an idea, make it.
2. Set up a website where other people can submit their ideas and pay you to custom build them in your Fab Lab.
3. Sell the products from 1 and 2 to anybody else who wants one.
4. Rent out your Fab Lab to other people who want to make stuff.
5. Don’t have the $20,000? Get some other people to chip in and share the Fab Lab.
6. Let local schools use your Fab Lab.

The last point is a big one. When Neil Gershenfeld let his kids mess around in his FabLab they ended up creating a 3D construction system that’s simple to produce and trumped the designs that MIT students were able to come up with. The design is now going into mass production:

Nice. But... What is it?

The great thing about Fab Labs is that MIT have written programs and guidelines to make everything so simple that even kids can quickly understand how to make what they want (see their website for more info). And doesn’t that make the world much more fun? Even MIT students managed to come up with a Fabaroni pasta printer that prints any shape in pasta dough:

Look! They got it to print MIT!

There are also huge potential applications for Fab Labs in international development. In fact,  partly due to $14 million worth of funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Fab Labs have already been established in India, Ghana, South Africa, Costa Rica and Afghanistan. These labs not only enable local engineers to solve problems unique to their region, but also open up all sorts of entrepreneurial opportunities around selling the products they come up with.

If you really had to, you could probably make a gun though...

So, basically, FabLabs are an all-round good idea. Neil Gershenfeld thinks it's just the beginning though, he envisages Fab Labs developing into something like a Star Trek replicator…

The future of Fab Labs?

Did I just ruin it all by saying that?

Anyway, if you still trust the man, you could have a look at his book:

And if you have any ideas for potential uses of Fab Labs, leave a comment!

Masai warrior	Australian Aborigine	Papua New Guinean
Native Amazonian	Eskimo	Saharan nomad

…in a room together?

(With interpreters.)

A pretty interesting interesting situation is what you get. And if you film it you get Big Tribal Brother: A documentary.

When I go into the supermarket and walk along the aisles packed with every type of food you can imagine, I often wonder: What would, say, an Eskimo think if they saw all this?

Personally, I’d be keen to watch a documentary just on that: an Eskimo in a supermarket. I mean, it doesn’t even have to be an Eskimo – any native tribesman or tribal warrior would do. But why not let’s go wild and get a group of indigenous tribesmen, of different origin, together? Then take them to the supermarket. Or the cinema. Or laser quest.

According to Survival International there are over 100 tribes around the world who continue to reject contact with the outside world. Amazingly, some of them have not yet had first contact with anyone from outside their small tribe. It almost defies belief that some societies on Earth have been through hundreds of years of agricultural, industrial and technological revolutions, which indigenous people in jungles still know nothing about!

Take the Sentinelese, for example, the as yet uncontacted indigenous people of the Andaman islands in the Indian Ocean. After the 2004 tsunami washed right over their home it was feared that they may have been wiped out – until, that is, a rescue team did a fly past and took this iconic photograph of a tribesman on the beach, his longbow aimed at their helicopter:

Sentinelese tribesman

And they’re not the only ones. This next photograph was taken of an uncontacted Amazonian tribe in 2008:

Amazonian tribe

A couple of hours after the first fly past had sent them scattering into the jungle, they had painted themselves red and came out fighting. Again, the longbows.

Now I’m not suggesting we get gentlemen like this involved. If these tribes reject contact with the outside world, they could well be better off that way. Apparently they’d be fairly likely to die from catching a cold off the film crew, which would run counter to the idea for the documentary.

But there are plenty of tribal people who’ve had contact with the outside world yet still haven’t been anywhere near a supermarket. And I reckon getting a few such tribesmen together and showing them a bit of the developed world would be a totally feasible idea for a documentary. Perhaps more interestingly: what will an aborigine from the Amazon say to an aborigine from the Australian outback? How will they interact? I think it would be an eye-opener for natives, viewers and film-makers alike.

We could even make a real effort and channel some of the profits made from this documentary back into charities like Survival International that work to protect tribal people, or environmental charities that preserve the increasingly endangered places these people are indigenous to.

But let’s not really make it Big Brother style eh? They might wear fur, they might be from West Papua, but we don’t need to make them our New Guinea pigs.

Ah, that's better.

Can’t be bothered to make the documentary, but love the idea? Follow me to Amazon:

Can’t be bothered to make the documentary or follow me to Amazon, but still love our big tribal brothers?

Click here to donate to Survival International

Steve McCurry's "Afghan Girl"

It was basically the cover that sold the DVD to me. This photograph just grabbed my attention. And it seems I’m not the only one to have noticed. According to the DVD, after this photo appeared on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985, they received over 2,000 letters from people wanting to marry the “Afghan girl”, adopt her, or just find out her name. Unfortunately, the photographer Steve McCurry knew nothing about her, other than that she was an Afghan refugee, roughly 12 years old, attending a school in a Pakistani refugee camp.

What a bittersweet irony for the Afghan girl. World famous, with eyes that could advertise her way out of war and poverty in one photoshoot, but she knew nothing about it – just that one day a foreign man pointed a foreign object at her and clicked. Thankfully for her, at least, the man was an American with a camera, not a Russian with a gun.

This photo was my inspiration behind what I think is a great idea. As I just mentioned, if this girl could stir up such a buzz with one photo, she would be like gold-dust to advertisers. This got me thinking. Is “Afghan Girl” the only beautiful girl to have lived in the developing world? Obviously not. So it seems there is an opportunity. This brings me to today’s idea:

Idea #3: Create a model agency to discover and exclusively represent potential models from developing countries.

Actually similar things have been done before. Saatchi and Saatchi’s campaign for charity Coraid featured poverty-stricken Africans modelling luxury products:

Saatchi and Saatchi's Coraid advert

More controversially, designer Vivienne Westwood has also used gypsies to model her creations on a catwalk in Milan, and Vogue India featured poor models wearing top designer gear:

Vogue India - controversial use of poor models

But I’m pretty sure the idea to create an agency whose business is solely based around poor models is an original idea. It’s also great in so many ways:

Poor models can be just as beautiful and more interesting

Take the Afghan Girl. The fact that an image of such beauty has emerged out of a humanitarian crisis makes it seem all the more beautiful by contrast. But it’s not just because she’s beautiful, it’s because she’s mysterious, she has a story – the picture engages you and sticks in your head. In short, it’s partly because she’s so poor that she makes such a good model.

And remember, models don’t really even have to be beautiful anymore, as Dove have reminded us through their series of Evolution videos, part of their “Campaign for Real Beauty”:

They don’t need special skills and they really need the money!

Gisele Bundchen - worth more than Afghan Girl?

As long as you have a face, you can model. I’m not interested in hearing anyone that says otherwise. Also, you can make an absolute bomb. Top earning supermodel, Gisele Bundchen is estimated to earn $25m this year. These facts combined a) make me sick, and b) convince me that modelling is probably the perfect occupation for beautiful, unskilled poor people from developing countries. Considering that more than 3 billion people live on less than $2.50 a day, there are plenty to choose from.

A lot of the money will filter back to their home country

Let’s imagine the poor models are paid a similar wage to the celebrity supermodels we know and love. I’d say there’s a fair chance they’ll invest a lot of it in their home country. The poor model agency could provide advice on how best the models could use their newfound wealth.

Alternatively, the model agency could operate more directly as a social enterprise. Models could be paid a reasonable wage, and the rest of the money fed into development charities or projects of their choice. This would also help avoid the problems that could result from the models receiving too much money.

Advertisers stand to benefit

The fact that this is a totally new kind of socially-minded development-oriented model agency will in itself attract a lot of media attention. Some may also see it as controversial, although I’m confident that the consensus will be in favour of such an enterprise if the models are treated fairly (which is, of course, central to this idea). Advertisers who use the poor models will be subject to a lot more media attention than usual, and that is just what they’re after. Associated companies will also benefit from extra corporate social responsibility kudos for choosing poor models over rich models. And all these benefits will come at a cheaper price than using celebrity models.

From all angles, I think the poor model agency is a beautiful idea. I’m sure that any entrepreneur who set this up would make a lot of money, as well as a valuable contribution to international development. Unfortunately, though, if you’ve got your heart set on the Afghan Girl she’ll be getting on a bit now. In 2002, 17 years after the original picture was taken, National Geographic found her living in Afghanistan:

Click the image to read the article "A Life Revealed"

But there are plenty more fish in the sea. You just have to find them. And that’s another thing that makes the poor model agency a dream start-up – you just have to take your camera and travel around the world to find beautiful, poor models! (Let me know when you’re going – I might come.)

If you want to help young kids like the Afghan Girl right now, you can donate to the National Geographic Afghan Children’s Fund.

If you want to find out more about her check out these DVDs: