juxtapositor

This is an idea for accelerating idea generation by creating a new "recombination" process for ideas.

In individuals, new ideas usually come from felicitous combinations of existing ideas. In conversation between people, new ideas usually come from the chance mention of different interests that happen to connect. Why not accelerate the combinatorial process?

Juxtapositor could be a piece of software that silently forms a database of all your creative work on the computer- text, images, code. It would cut this into random snippets, and present them in a kind of ambient display. This way, you might be working on a UI design, and on the juxtapositor display you see a fragment of an email from last week, a photo you took two years ago, an icon you just drew... and the photo triggers a visual layout idea for the UI that wouldn't otherwise have had.

It could be networked, so you'd be sharing your pool of ideas with a group (I think this would be a small group of people you were already friends with, so you could have some context).