Timeless

A timeless idea, or what I sometimes call Timeless, with a captial T, pertains to an idea, concept, or thought that doesn’t have any correlation in time, whatsoever. It is the result of the mind wandering in places it didn’t deliberately go to.

It is the result of imaginative exploration and Play, whereby the formulation of an idea, concept, or thought is the result of serendipity, rather than manual labor.

CASE STUDY #1

I and my thesis groupmates had a brainstorming session today, where we talked about possible Big Ideas for our marketing campaign in our thesis (we’re making a Capstone output related to the following keywords: family planinng, vasectomy, and birth-control). One of my groupmates, Renzo brought up a catchy idea regarding what we could be one of our creative executions. He said something about making a packaging for band-aids, within which there would be informative materials regarding the keywords I just mentioned.

I thought this was creative, but the band-aids really weren’t that close to vasectomy. As I thought of the idea, I didn’t think much of it (at least in the deliberate sense), but some funny thing popped into my mind. “What if we made what’s inside the creative packaging to something more related to vasectomy?” And a pregnancy kit came into my mind.

What if we could create a pregnancy kit for men, as the highlight of our creative executions. I thought to myself, “We’re quite there. But not yet.”

And so as I tried to think, think, and think, something out of the ordinary came. It’s the idea of the blue pill vs the red pill, from The Matrix. Here’s my thought process, in chronological order, so you can better visualize

1. Band-aids
2. Pregnancy kit for men
3. The Matrix
4. Blue Pill vs Red Pill
5. Oral Contraceptive Pills (OCPs), but for men

The idea is formulated like so, building upon the idea of Renzo, in a very discombobulated and creative way. It is important to note that the formulation of the idea has been facilitated in no way whatsoever intentional (as in, it’s a Timeless thought — the result of the mind wandering in places it didn’t specifically plan to go to. A better word could be, as I detailed above, serendipity):

“What if we could create a creative packaging that contains OCPs, but for men? The creative twist is adding information about vasectomy inside the pills.”

To which Renzo added, “Much like fortune cookies!”

And there it was. I agreed. For obvious design reasons, the OCP would be a singular pill inside the box, so its functionality is more straightforward and obvious. And yes, there’s a lot of nuance here that have yet to be talked about. I just thought it would be a nice representation of what a Timeless thought could be.