IDEA
We have designed the Ideas Sharpener to support informal working behaviors and make those working moments recognizable from the outside.

INSPIRATION
The user research we did with *Anna*, a writer, showed us how the home-office environment suits the emergence of informal working patterns.
She has different times and spaces of work flow and she succeeds in making them compatible with the heterogeneous organization of her house. This allows her to commute fluidly among spaces according to her process of generating ideas. When she needs high concentration, she works in the studio, while when she wants to get more inspiration, she either goes to the kitchen and starts chopping vegetables or goes out for a walk. To unfocus first, as she likes to describes it, works as her best way to be able to focus again and keep on her working flow.
The informal working behaviors she has developed inside/outside of the HomeOffice is particularly interesting for us in the extent that they were contaminated and mixed with already existing household and lifestyle pattern.
With our design, we address the informal work flow that this particular group of people develops around themselves, maybe bringing it to some extreme scenarios to stimulate reflections around the topic of the "domestic working landscape".

DESIGN PROCESS
The choice of materials and references of the shapes shows the belonging of the object to the home environment, but at the same time stimulates to bring it outside or combining it with its different modules.

HOW DOES IT WORK?
The Ideas Sharpener consists of a recording device that will help the user in the vegetable chopping brainstorm and that could be carried with the user during the regenerative walks.
The records stored by the device will then be downloaded on the computer, producing a working sheet that literally maps all the ideas generated during the informal working process according to geolocation coordinates.