We love to see how people and businesses are using IdeaPaint to create and collaborate. We received a great IdeaPaint success story email recently from
Doug Wittnebel, Principal at
Gensler.
Gensler is a global architecture, design, planning and consulting firm with more than 2,000 professionals networked across 33 locations. Gensler partners with their clients on over 3,000 projects every year. These projects can be as small as a wine label or as large as a new urban district. Their work reflects an enduring commitment to sustainability and the belief that design is one of the most powerful strategic tools for securing lasting competitive advantage.
Doug was kind enough to send along some great photos and a video of an IdeaPaint wall mural he created for an International Interior Design Association event which depicts a sustainable community of the future. Check out this video!
"IdeaPaint is a great product for designers, architects, artists, engineers, graphic designers, software engineers, and anyone who appreciates the opportunity to move beyond the confines of paper or layout sheets," says Wittnebel.
He reports that the Gensler team uses their IdeaPaint wall for mind-mapping, design planning and group brainstorming. "It's like painting on a large canvas," he says. "IdeaPaint lets me step back and discover new ways of creating."
Doug discussed the mural itself, saying "this type of drawing delivers a strong impact. As most drawing media have migrated to the digital realm, and even in our day-to-day work process most drawing activity stays hidden within individual devices, it can be refreshing to see this type of piece, just like it is refreshing to see painted murals on sides of buildings or within interior spaces."
You can see some of Doug's other work on his blog.
Considering IdeaPaint? Request a sample, or buy online.
Do you have an IdeaPaint success story? Share your story!
IdeaPaint loves tools (and toys) that foster creativity and collaboration at work, home and school. Here are a few websites and apps that we use here at the office. What do you use? Post below!
Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your notable life using your computer, phone, and the web. Chances are, if you can see it or think of it, Evernote can help you remember it. Type a text note. Clip a web page. Snap a photo. Grab a screenshot. Evernote will keep it all safe. Everything you capture is automatically processed, indexed, and made searchable. If you like, you can add tags or organize notes into different notebooks. Search for notes by keywords, titles, and tags.
How we use it: Our offices (as you would guess) are wall-to-wall whiteboards. Every work space, every conference room is 100% dry-erasable. We use Evernote to capture the notes, charts and doodles on the walls, and then share and archive this information for all employees. Evernote lets us continue our collaboration process off-the-wall, and magically makes our handwritten text searchable inside our images too!
(Hint: we have some fun stuff lined up with Evernote, stay tuned)
Issuu is a digital publishing platform that delivers exceptional reading experiences of magazines, books, catalogs, reports, and more. In just a few seconds users can create beautiful digital editions simply by uploading their publications. Issuu's mission is to empower individuals, companies, and institutions to publish their documents across all digital platforms.
Issuu is also a popular destination site visited by millions every month. It's a dynamic library where people are drawn to and engaged by great publications and where publishers find and build targeted audiences.
How we use it: IdeaPaint uses issue to organize and share sales tools and collateral pieces with partners, stakeholders and customers. Not only are we presenting information is a more convenient and attractive way, but we are saving money and trees by reducing printed materials.
Prezi is an online presentation tools that completely shatters how presentations are planned, delivered and experienced. It's Powerpoint meets Star Wars. Their zoom function and boundless canvas, plus the ability to seamlessly integrate media and real time note-taking, makes presentation rich, engaging and experiential.
How we use it: We use Prezi for many of the internal presentations you would normally use Powerpoint or Keynote for, but they are just much more awesome.
HootSuite is a social media dashboard that lets you monitor and manage multiple social networks through one client. The platform includes a team workflow tool that easily allows multiple users to contribute. HootSuite integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Wordpress and more.
How we us it: We use HootSuite to manage our social conversations. Their multi-stream view, and tab navigation, make this process simple and fast. HootSuite helps us better engage our customers and partners, and saves us time and headaches by not having to switch between clients. It also helps connect marketing and sales efforts through the team workflow tool.
Bubbl.us is a simple and free web application that lets you brainstorm online. Bubbl.us helps you create colorful mind maps online, and share and work with friends.
How we use it: Bubbl.us is incredibly simple to use, and we like using it for site mapping, video story-boarding and brand planning. It's great for brainstorming, and our mind maps are easily sharable internally, with agencies etc. The tool itself is so basic (in a good way) that we don't get caught up in layout --- you just click to add a box, connect it, and move on.
We'd love to hear what online tools you are using to foster creativity and collaboration. Post comments below and let us know!
Learn more about IdeaPaint!
Over a two-year period, the Operations & Maintenance Department of the Mat-Su Borough School District based in Palmer, Alaska is helping teachers and students get rid of chalk dust. Switching to dry-erase surfaces with IdeaPaint will help protect students and staff with allergies and asthma and keep dust from damaging electronics.
“Every board replaces another,” said Don Carney, Assistant Director of Operations and Maintenance, so it saves the District money. Carney reports that resurfacing old whiteboards and chalkboards with IdeaPaint saves the District about 66% in purchase, installation, upkeep, and replacement costs.
The Operations & Maintenance Department plans to refurbish all of the Districts' old whiteboards and chalkboards into new, high-performing dry-erase surfaces with IdeaPaint. Before school starts in August, approximately 80 boards will be painted—40 at Palmer High School and 40 at Colony High School. During the winter break, another 80, and by next summer, all the old whiteboards and chalkboards in the District painted. Carney said that two District employees could prep and paint about 20 chalkboards in two days.
The Mat-Su Borough School District points to the following benefits of using IdeaPaint:
• Provides innovation for classrooms
• Saves money—costs about 66% less than replacing traditional whiteboards or chalkboards; shipping is about 1/3 the cost of shipping whiteboards or chalkboards
• Protects the environment by restoring/recycling worn-out whiteboards and chalkboards—there is nothing to throw out
• Saves energy—traditional dry-erase boards require baking and curing procedures that consume large amount of energy. IdeaPaint is simply stirred
• Cutting maintenance time—installation and maintenance is about 1/3 the required time of that for more traditional boards
Related blog posts:
“The Creativity Crisis.” That was Newsweek’s recent cover story that has parents and educators across the country worried. The story reports on recent data that suggests creativity scores of children have fallen significantly in the last 20 years -- even as their IQ scores have been steadily increasing. It’s a troubling trend that IdeaPaint would like to help turn around.
The Newsweek piece jumps off a recent study of the so called “Torrance kids,” a large group of Minneapolis children tested for their creativity abilities by professor E. Paul Torrance back in the late 50's. The study tracked those former grade-schoolers for adult expressions of creativity such as authoring books, holding art shows, starting businesses or filing for patents. Turns out that the kids who scored high on the Torrance test back in early grade school showed far more adult creative accomplishments than children with high IQs. That result has been big news within the group of scholars who study intelligence and creativity. Finding tangible connections between creativity scores and academic or career success has been a difficult challenge. Creativity, by its nature, is a hard trait to measure in both children and adults.
But the part of the article that has the public talking is the dramatic decline in Torrance scores in the last two decades. The trend is most significant with children between kindergarten through sixth grade. Just as social scientists have proved how important creativity is to adult success, the trait appears to be slipping away.
Suggested culprits include the increasing amount of screen time in the lives of young children. Electronic media -- even in the form of interactive learning games -- seldom encourages novel thinking or imagination. Others theorize that shifting trends in education -- the increasing emphasis on test scores -- is partly responsible. Even the toys children play with have come under scrutiny. Some scholars and educators have pointed out how fewer and fewer modern toys encourage open-ended play. A generation ago, for instance, Legos encouraged children to build anything they could imagine. Today they come prepackaged to create the “Typhoon Turbo Sub” and the like.
“Whether this trend can be turned around depends critically on understanding the nature of creativity,” says IdeaPaint’s Chief Marketing Officer Marcus Wilson. “Teachers and bosses often say they want to promote creativity, but they don't always have the real-world knowledge, or the tools, to engender it.”
Creativity scholar R. Keith Sawyer agrees that people often talk about creativity but seldom understand the trait. He's spent much of his career debunking the common myths that surround the topic.
Myth #1: Creativity Springs Spontaneously from the Unconscious
This assumption leads some to believe that creativity is a mysterious and unknowable process and to devalue the role of conscious thought and directed attention. Fortunately, it doesn’t appear to be true. Studies on the topic have shown that brilliant ideas rarely pop, fully formed, out of the unconscious mind. “Creativity is mostly conscious, hard work,” notes Sawyer. “Rather than a mysterious unconscious force, the explanation of creativity lies in hard work and everyday mental processes.”
Myth #2: Creativity and Intelligence are Opposites
Some teachers feel like they have to make the choice between teaching disciplined, rational thinking and fostering creativity. With limited time and resources they take the attitude: ‘You can be creative only after you finish memorizing your multiplication table.’ Creativity tests and intelligence tests do measure different things: One measures the ability to come up with the right answer and the other the ability to come up with many possible answers. Social scientists call the former convergent thinking and the later divergent thinking. But these two ways of thinking through a problem are not opposites. One’s ability to come up with a useful answer to a complex problem almost always requires a period of divergent thinking before one begins to sort through and pick the most useful options. “Kid’s are encouraged very young to search only for the right answer on a multiple-choice test,” says Wilson. “Unfortunately, in the real world of jobs and businesses there are no multiple choice tests. The challenge is not to come up with a single right answer but many right answers and then pick the best one.”
No one comes up with a useful novel idea unless one possesses a deep knowledge of the subject at hand. In addition, one’s ability to come up with a useful answer to a complex problem almost always requires a period of divergent thinking before one begins to sort through and pick the most useful options.
Myth #3: Creativity is an Individual Trait
This may be the most pervasive and misleading myth surrounding creativity but the science debunking it is clear: Creativity emerges as much from social worlds and physical environments as it does from individual minds. Sawyer points out that this myth probably comes from the American tendency to rewrite history in the form of stories of great triumphs by single individuals. Thomas Edison, for instance, is often given lone credit for the inventions patented under his name. In fact, his prolific career depended on his ability to build a workshop that sparked the creativity of the 14 men who worked for him. Understood in this way, the study of creativity becomes as much the province of anthropology, sociology, architecture and design as it is of psychology. “We’ve learned that creativity is almost never a solitary activity,” says Sawyer, “but that it’s fundamentally social and collaborative.”
The staff of IdeaPaint has seen this first hand countless times – recently through our work with the Drew Brees Dream Foundation and The Idea Village, a New Orleans entrepreneurial program that encourages high school students' to think like entrepreneurs. “It’s amazing what can happen when you get kids on their feet and working collaboratively to fill a blank canvas,” says IdeaPaint's Jeff Avallon. “Suddenly the sparks are flying.” Similarly, the Warren-Prescott School in Boston reports that "class-wide, there is a greater sense of 'chance taking' with IdeaPaint."
We are social creatures after all, deeply programmed to mimic each other’s behavior. If our social and physical environment effectively communicates the message that creativity is the currency in play, the activity becomes second nature.
IdeaPaint, whether used at home, work or school, is part of a matrix of solutions that can get people working together, solving problems, and thinking creatively.
Request a sample of IdeaPaint and watch creativity and imaginations grow.
IdeaPaint is excited and proud to be working with The Brees Dream Foundation, The Idea Village and Google to launch the Trust Your Crazy Ideas Challenge, an after-school entrepreneurship program for New Orleans high schools.
“Many of the attributes of football - resiliency, passion, preparation and teamwork - translate into entrepreneurship,” remarks Drew Brees, quarterback of the New Orleans Saints and founder of the Brees Dream Foundation. “As an entrepreneur myself, I am delighted to partner with The Idea Village to bring this entrepreneurial spirit to New Orleans high schools.”
Since 2000, The Idea Village has focused on creating positive change in New Orleans by identifying, supporting and retaining entrepreneurial talent. Drew Brees embodied The Idea Village mantra, "Trust Your Crazy Ideas," as he led the New Orleans Saints to a Super Bowl championship. In doing so, he encouraged his team – and the community – to believe in the power of turning a bold dream into a triumphant reality. Together with IdeaPaint and Google, they will encourage the New Orleans youth to do the same through the Trust Your Crazy Ideas Challenge. Check out The Idea Village on Facebook.
With support from IdeaPaint, the creator of innovative dry-erase whiteboard paint products and the official paint supplier of the Trust Your Crazy Ideas Challenge, the Brees Dream Foundation is sponsoring IDEArooms in four New Orleans high schools. Through the installation of IdeaPaint, IDEArooms boast floor-to-ceiling dry-erase surfaces. These classrooms will become centers of innovation, creativity and collaboration, and the home base for the after-school entrepreneurship program and business contest, hosted by the Brees Dream Foundation and The Idea Village. See photos.
"We love participating in a program that so directly encourages entrepreneurship and creativity," says IdeaPaint's Jeff Avallon. "IdeaPaint was founded by college students who were looking for a better way to work and explore new ideas, and we are thrilled to help give these young people spaces to collaborate and innovate."
Learn more about IdeaPaint.
Drew Brees is challenging teams of nine students per school to launch a for-profit business in which proceeds support a school project. The Brees Dream Foundation will match up to $10,000 in revenue generated by the winning team who will be invited to pitch alongside MBA and corporate teams during The Idea Village’s New Orleans Entrepreneur Week (March 18 – 25, 2011).
Google is also a partner in this exciting initiative. Google’s K-12 Talent and Outreach Team is sponsoring technology centers in each of the participating high schools and will provide curriculum support to the students, demonstrating how to use technology to grow their businesses in the new global marketplace.
The four pilot schools include Edna Karr Secondary School, Lusher Charter School, Walter L. Cohen High Schools and Warren Easton Senior High School.
Entrepreneurs in The Idea Village portfolio will partner with each student team, serving as a product supplier and mentor for their budding ventures. Partner entrepreneurs include Bayou Brew, Feelgoodz, NOLA Couture and REpurposingNOLA Piece by Peace™.
Tim Williamson, co-founder and CEO of The Idea Village remarks, “Drew Brees has inspired an entire community to believe in the sense of possibility. We hope that the Trust Your Crazy Ideas Challenge stimulates this belief and entrepreneurial fervor for participating students and their future career paths.”
Alex Hochron, Health Sciences Academy Principal of Cohen High School adds, “Drew Brees is the perfect role model, both on and off the football field. By teaching high school students about entrepreneurship, and inspiring them to think beyond their textbooks, we are developing our next generation of business leaders.”
The Brees Dream Foundation, The Idea Village and IdeaPaint share a belief in the possibility – and the promise – of turning a crazy idea into a legendary success. In leveraging their respective organizations to support entrepreneurship among New Orleans' youth, the city is being positioned as a world-class model for driving economic and social change.
Learn more about the Trust Your Crazy Ideas Challenge.
Also, check out this feature on Drew Brees and The Idea Village in Entrepreneur Magazine.
Got your own crazy ideas?? Buy IdeaPaint.
It doesn’t matter where you spend your 9-5. IdeaPaint is the perfect creative solution for any type of business. You can create a place to share information with your customers, co-workers or clients. IdeaPaint turns any smooth surface into a useful and interactive dry-erase workspace.
Here are some great spaces to use IdeaPaint at work.
1. Create your "war room" - build an ideation space that is both functional and boundless. Paint all four walls floor to ceiling, paint the conference table. Get your co-workers on their feet working and exploring as a team. Turn a meeting into a doing.
2. Paint your desk - do away with sticky notes and scratch pads. Use IdeaPaint to take notes during calls, keep track of your action items and brainstorm new ideas.
3. Paint a wall or counter in your break room or staff lounge - create a fun and interactive space to communicate with your team, poll the staff on where the company outing should happen, or encourage whoever left that moldy sandwich in the fridge to handle their business.
4. Paint a surface that lets you and your team interact and expand on your projections. Take that static presentation and turn it into a dynamic and collaborative experience for co-workers and clients.
5. Paint a space in your lobby to engage customers - create a guest sign-in, post daily specials or important announcements, or simply look cooler than your competitors.
6. Resurface older whiteboards or chalkboards - use IdeaPaint to breathe new life into your existing work surfaces. Resurfacing with IdeaPaint is both cost effective and environmentally responsible. Each year tens of millions of pounds of worn-out whiteboards and chalkboards end up in landfills. Save time, money and Mother Earth.
7. Turn your office doors into messaging centers - list your schedule for the day, show when you'll be out of the office, and leave a space for people to leave you notes for when you get back.
8. Paint columns, cubicles and hallways - turn that wasted space into areas to collaborate, communicate and brainstorm. Turn every corner of your office into a space where ideas can hatch, grow and evolve. Make your work space work.
Check out other photos of where people are using IdeaPaint at work.
Where are you using IdeaPaint? Post a comment below and let us know!
Ready to bust out the painting supplies? Buy IdeaPaint online!
IdeaPaint returned to Dwell on Design in 2010 as a sponsor of the Modern Family Zone. The centerpiece of our booth was a fantastic playhouse which had been coated floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall in IdeaPaint. Throughout this three-day event, families gravitated to the Modern Family Zone to revel in this 360° dry-erase experience. If you've never seen IdeaPaint up-close, you should request a dry sample and see what all the buzz is about!
After the event, this incredible playhouse was donated to Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles, an organization that "builds and renovates homes with a goal of eliminating substandard housing by making decent, affordable housing a matter of conscience and action in our communities."
"It was a great show for us," says IdeaPaint CMO Marcus Wilson. "Last year we had IdeaPaint in a lot of different spaces at Dwell, and this year we chose to focus a bit more on creating an innovative space for kids. It was really fun to see how creative kids were getting in the playhouse, and to talk with parents about how IdeaPaint can be integrated into their home.
"On the trade side, it was exciting to see a big difference from last year to this year, where last year architects and designers were just learning about IdeaPaint, but this year we were talking to professionals who had already specced IdeaPaint into their projects."
Check out all the amazing photos from our trip!
Learn more about our award-winning dry-erase paint, or if you are feeling ready to pick up a roller, buy IdeaPaint online!
When chalk dust became a problem at the Warren-Prescott School in Charlestown MA, the school initially turned to melamine boards as a solution to resurface their chalkboards. The teachers found that after a short time, the surface became essentially unusable due to ghosting and poor performance. A parent who had seen IdeaPaint in action at the Charlestown Boys & Girls Club stepped in to advocate on behalf of the teachers to improve the classrooms. Within weeks, over 800 square-feet of IdeaPaint PRO had been installed across multiple classrooms to do away with the melamine boards and resurface the chalkboards underneath.
In the classroom of Scott Frost, an 8th-grade math and science teacher, IdeaPaint PRO was also used to resurface all the desks in the room, creating a unique and powerful learning environment for his students. We paid a visit to Mr. Frost's classroom to see how our product was performing, and were amazed by how he had incorporated IdeaPaint into his teaching process.
"As a traditional whiteboard medium," said Mr. Frost, "the IdeaPaint surface is a superior product. The marker color is clearer in both sharpness and color saturation. The colors pop off the surface, allowing more use of multiple colors in one presentation. This is especially valuable in math where you can solve or compare graphs in different colors. Clean up is also faster and easier. There is zero retention of pigment on the surface after wiping down with a damp cloth.
"The clear advantage in using IdeaPaint is the surface versatility. In my classroom all of the tables have an IdeaPaint surface. The impact on participation and learning was immediate. At the middle school level in an urban setting, the ability to engage students in learning is often a difficult task. The tables have been instrumental in fostering student engagement. Currently I have a student that until now has avoided most classroom work. The ability to write on the tables has brought this student into the classroom community. The student has demonstrated an understanding of moon phases and eclipses that would have eluded me before with their lack of previous classroom work. He now sees the table as a medium different from the traditional notebook and as a source of imagination, and this has somehow mollified his previous disengagement.
"Class wide, there is a greater sense of 'chance taking' with the tables that is tangible. Also, group collaboration is enhanced and the larger surface allows inter-group work to take place more easily. I can't explain why; it just happens. Once a few ground rules are covered, the students jump right into it and begin writing."
Learn more about how IdeaPaint is being used in schools.
See "before" and "after" photos on Flickr
As a follow up to our video interview with charity: water founder Scott Harrison, we were really excited to see this new video they created using IdeaPaint. The video is part of their amazing fundraising campaign at mycharitywater.org. We are proud to have even a small role in helping them deliver such a big message.
Check out the video, and pass it along.
mycharity: water reaches $2 million mark. from charity: water on Vimeo.
IdeaPaint is thrilled to announce that our award-winning dry erase paint is now available at 365 Lowes locations from Virginia to Maine.
Imagine an entire room as one giant sketch pad. IdeaPaint can be applied almost anywhere to create interactive play areas, work spaces in a home office, or a message center in the kitchen. Here are
10 places in your home that would be even more awesome with IdeaPaint.
Since its launch in 2008, IdeaPaint has steadily built its customer base in the work, school and—most recently—home categories. The company has also partnered with several distributors that now sell IdeaPaint’s dry-erase paint products in over 20 countries. IdeaPaint’s agreement with Lowe’s is the company’s first with a “big box” retailer.
“Our retail launch with Lowe’s for our ‘HOME’ dry-erase paint is the culmination of years of work spent spreading the word and fortifying loyal customer support for IdeaPaint—painting the walls of everyone who would let us,” said Jeff Avallon, co-founder of IdeaPaint. “The incredibly positive response to our product and its ability to facilitate idea-sharing and communication has been overwhelming. We are thrilled to bring IdeaPaint’s unique qualities to a whole new audience, and to do this with a pre-eminent home improvement store such as Lowe’s is truly icing on the cake.”
Learn more at ideapaint.com/lowes, or buy IdeaPaint online.
