Philippe Starck is a French product designer who has designed everything from toothbrushes to hotel interiors and is now creative director of interior design company Yoo. His simple, iconic and often startling designs entered the mass market when in 2002 he created a number of beautifully designed, but inexpensive, products for Target stores. Starck writes in a blog post for Wired about what creativity means to him: “Creativity is almost a mortal sickness. It’s not easy to be happy and creative: With creativity comes great anxiety, great effort, great desire for love. To be creative, you have to be curious, generous, to want to try to understand.” For Starck, to be creative, “it helps to live a sort of modern monk’s life. I go early to bed and wake up a little earlier than others because the peak — the hormonal peak of creativity — is around seven o’clock in the morning. To be creative, you can’t be intoxicated by drugs or alcohol. You cannot be intoxicated by poison coming from industrial food. You have to go to the gym and have a lot of sex (although not necessarily in that order!). You also need to live consciously avoid mainstream thinking. If you go out every night for dinner or to a cocktail party, where you speak with everybody, you cannot create because you just end up just repeating what people tell you. You get very comfortable and very unoriginal. The only way to create is to be alone, in front of a white, blank sheet of paper or your computer in the middle of nowhere. It’s the best way to find only your ideas, your intuition.” For most, the idea of living a monk’s life to unleash their creativity isn’t an option, and luckily it isn’t necessary, but it does require some concentrated effort. Creativity is not a a gift that only a select few are given – we all have it, and if we treat it like a muscle that needs to be exercised regularly it will only grow stronger!

Take a tripod, add some simple wheels and now you can create Hollywood-style moving shots with your little old non-professional camera. Featured in Fast Company with a demo video here.

Created by Poteet Architects in Texas.

A cool little camera that fits behind your ear from Looxcie.

Check it out here.

What if charging your cell phone was as easy as sticking it in your pocket for a few hours? That’s the premise of the Nokia E-Cu concept phone, developed by British designer Patrick Hyland. Hyland’s Nokia E-Cu (E for environment, Cu for Copper) phone features a copper exterior and a thermogenerator integrated interior that converts heat energy into electric energy.

These are from Japan and were created by D-Barcode. For the full article in Fast Company click here.

Kevin Scott, 21, designed the space-age bike that wraps around a lamp post so it can be locked-up safely – without the need for a lock or chain. The De Montfort University graduate used a ratchet system built into the frame of the bike to allow it to wrap around a pole, enabling the lock to be wrapped through both wheels and the frame. See more here.

Seeds embedded in the recycled card will grow up to 100 trees. See more here.

The quality of sound delivered through typical ear bud headphones devalues the music according to Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, who as a solution have created a line of high end headphones called Beats. In this article in the Financial Times, Iovine describes how he is trying to raise the bar in sound quality. “The people we work with spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year getting the sound exactly right.” But then, says Iovine, his emotions rising, much of what has been so carefully captured in the studio recording process has to be “dumbed down” or compressed by 20-25 per cent to be copied on to a CD, before being further compressed into an MP3 file format for playing on a computer or mobile phone with a sound processor likely to have cost just 50 cents. Sound quality is lost at every step of the process. “That’s like taking the Beatles master [recording] and playing it through a portable television,” he says with revulsion. Ramping up the similes, he points out that 80 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds listen to music at home through computers whose speakers, typically, “make the helicopters in Apocalypse Now sound like mosquitoes”.

“This is only the beginning of something huge,” Dr Dre claims. Iovine concurs: “Beats is a headphone now but it’s [also] an idea to fix the ecosystem of music.” Together, they intend to develop music’s answer to the Blu-ray disc or 3D movie, a premium technology that helps a business hurt by illegal downloading.