About Useful Ideas

Useful Ideas is an independent publication exploring interesting ideas that are useful in making someone's life work a little better.

Every issue begins with a question.

Sometimes the answer is hidden inside an ordinary object — a wheelbarrow, a zipper, or a paper clip. Sometimes it's found in a breakthrough technology, an overlooked invention, or a community quietly solving a difficult problem.

Our goal isn't simply to explain how things work.

It's to help readers notice the ideas/methods/strategies behind them — and perhaps create a few useful ideas of their own.

Useful Ideas is for curious, creative people.

Designers. Builders. Inventors. Engineers. Entrepreneurs. Teachers. Makers. Students. Lifelong learners. And anyone who has ever picked up an everyday object and wondered, “Who thought of this?” or “Why does it work that way?”

If you’re fascinated by remarkable ideas—and the people who bring them to life — you’ll feel right at home here.

Curated by David Alan Foster

I’ve spent much of my career as an early adopter — following interesting problems, projects, and startups before the fields around them had acquired names. That journey has involved digitalization, expert systems, deep learning, global connectivity, renewable energy, clean technology, and extreme affordability.

My work has crossed design disciplines, industries, and organizational forms: nonprofits, businesses, startups, and social enterprises. I’ve worked in publishing, invention, the early commercial web, distance learning, entrepreneurship, humanitarian design, manufacturing, sustainability, and emerging technology.

The subjects have changed, but the instinct has remained consistent: recognize a useful idea, understand what it could become, and assemble — or join — the people and resources needed to make it real.

I began professionally in digital typography, worked with early Macintosh technology, created an international magazine for independent inventors, and helped organize the first international inventors trade show. Later, I designed for the emerging commercial web, helped connect schools for distance learning, evangelized mobile solar generators, worked with founders and inventors, and organized professional talent around products intended to improve people’s lives.

I’m most useful where disciplines overlap and the path is not yet clearly marked — spotting patterns, connecting possibilities, giving ideas form, and suggesting which might deserve to be pursued.

That is why I created Useful Ideas.

UI is where I document projects, examine how useful things come into being, and share what the work has taught me — enough material, by now, for a thousand articles. It also gives ideas a place to exist before they belong to a company, client, or category. Some may remain observations; others may become collaborations, products, services, or new ventures.

UI is both a record of work already done and a workshop for whatever might come next. Its present-day expressions include this publication; my nonprofit Uplift490; my design business Veteran Tool Design; and, most importantly, Aquastry, which turns the two largest biowastes into chemistries that reclaim water and remediate soil — three very different applications of the same underlying instinct: making life better for as many people as possible.

— David