Monday, November 01, 2010

A Birthday Idea and a Request for Participation

Last Thursday, I attended a workshop at the Stanford Institute of Design (d.school). It was really quite interesting and I felt that I learned a few things about how to better think. We were broken up into teams and worked on how we could improve the gift giving experience.

Anyway, one idea that came out of our team discussions seemed interesting enough to perhaps try. So, here I am calling out to my friends to see if they would be willing to entertain this idea. I think it could be fun and possibly improve our lives.

So, normally we receive gifts when it's our birthday. There are a couple problems with this tradition as I see it. The first one is that we need to remember others' birthdays, which I suppose is less of a problem these days with help from Facebook. Another problem is that when we get inundated with gifts all at once, we usually don't really get to fully enjoy them all. A third problem is that we have to shop for gifts throughout the year since birthdays are usually a bit scattered.

The idea that I'd like to try out is this... instead of receiving gifts on our birthdays, we should be giving them out. So, on my birthday I will give out birthday gifts to everyone in my gift-giving circle of friends and family. I will then expect to receive gifts on all of their birthdays. This solves all three of the problems I mentioned. Also, I do believe that receiving gifts spread out over the year will marginally improve the happiness levels in our lives.

The question now is... who's in?

1 comment:

Jorge Monasterio said...

I think the Octomom's kids are not going to be joining you.

Or maybe they already have.

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