Friday, May 22, 2009

How to Think Like a Fool #20: Exaggerate the Details

IMAGINE: Exaggerate the Details
Exaggerating helps to find problems or make things more difficult. It's also a great way to break out of a stuck mindset and push yourself to fix the unbroken.

If you've got one, what if you had one hundred, or if it's big, what if it was miniscule? The answers to these questions and others like them lead to new paths of imaginary exploration, and if put into action, will take more work, but will be harder to imitate.

The EepyBird Guys may not have been the first to create a geyser by putting Mentos in a bottle of Diet Coke, but they used the power of exaggeration (and inspired choreography) to create an internet-and-beyond phenomenon with 101 two-liter bottles of Diet Coke and 523 Mentos. For those few people who still haven't seen it:

"At EepyBird, we always try to take things further than any sane person would, so we spent the next eight months developing different effects, building up to Experiment #137... As we kept developing new fountain effects, we realised we had to try something really huge."
—Fritz Grobe from: The brains behind: EepyBird.com - .net magazine

Although I have uncovered a top-secret photo of EepyBird guy Stephen Voltz that may show where he truly gets his ideas:

Think: How can I exaggerate details of my problem? What if I multiply, shrink, stretch, enlarge, or somehow overly alter aspects of the solution?

Tomorrow: How to Think Like a Fool #21: Fantasize the Future

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