I once attended a "creativity" workshop, and one of the tasks was coming up with a solution for an everyday annoyance. IIRC the process was something along the

I once attended a "creativity" workshop, and one of the tasks was coming up with a solution for an everyday annoyance. IIRC the process was something along the lines of... 1) Decide on a task or something that you do regularly (e.g grocery shopping) 2) Detail all the steps involved in completing the task (e.g walking round the store, finding items, comparing prices, putting items in cart, queueing up at checkout etc etc) 3) Rate each one in terms of annoyance/difficulty level 4) Start to brainstorm how the high annoyance steps could be easier. I can't remember the exact steps - there was a bit more to it than that, but as a team of 4 we had some pretty cool ideas after an hour.