Blog of Emelie Ivansson

Finally got my inspiration back, inspiration to create something else than the commissioned design I’ve been forcing myself to bust out the last few months.

Since I left San Francisco last September I haven’t been able to put any emotions onto my photoshop canvas. Usually my inspiration comes with anger, frustration, sadness, loss or happiness(!), but this time it didn’t, I think it was to painful to let it out that I kept it inside me and did everything to ignore the feelings. That’s not the right way to go though, I need my time to process, I need my time with photoshop to get it out of me, and to be able to move on. Well, it still hurts, but I guess this means I can see a small glimpse of light after all.

I’m excited over my new ideas, excited to have my excitement back, the feeling I remember from back at Hyper, when it was too hard to fall a sleep at night because I couldn’t wait to start working the day after. When after an hour trying, I got up and went to school, rather spending an all-nighter playing in photoshop in a scary old prison than sleeping comfi in my warm an cosy bed.

The cold in London is almost Swedish right now, and even if I rather spent all day under my duvet, I’d decide to take a inspirational field trip down Camden Market. In need of creative ideas for my latest freelance gig as well as warm socks, and I found both. Now back to my comfi workstation (my bed) for another weekend of work.

After five days of brainstorming we actually got our 50 business ideas.

To get inspired we did a lot of different activities and brainstorming sessions; such as randomly give each other three words and in one minute come up with an idea from that. We used post-it’s for brainstorming within different fields/services, for example; Skype, Bluetooth, msn, questioning ourselves; how we could combine/use this in new ways.

Besides that we went for inspirations walks, visited the Marine Museum, shops etc. Which was very useful, to just analyze the environment and find things to improve and need to fill.

In the end we actually got our ideas, many of them was totally crazy, some of them already done and a few we really believed we would be able to develop.

Now the task was to choose one of these ideas to develop further. We agreed to go with an SMS-reminder service online, shortly explained. After three days of researching we didn’t only come to the conclusion that our idea was great, it was too expensive to go thought with as well. We also realized that or main competitor would be the big Swedish company Telia, and we would find it rather hard to keeping up with them. So we had to start all over again bring a new idea into research. The same researching work we’ve been doing in three days had now to be done in three hours. But we worked really effective and managed it.

As a reward to ourselves for working so hard, we had a relaxing taco-evening, with lots of laughs and scary movies at Virginias place.