Make your month about thinking outside that box

Welcome back to another episode of A'lil Hoohaa's monthly photo blogging challenge.

August's theme is "Make your month about thinking outside that box". Come again?

I struggled a little with this. I mean, it sounds simple enough until you actually have to find five pictures that illustrate it. 

So I started looking at things I've come across recently and asking myself: Could this be it?

The solar eclipse

As a Western European, I was lucky enough to witness the solar eclipse on August 12. For many of my North American readers, this may have gone completely unnoticed. Not because it wasn't happening, but because it wasn't visible from where you were.

And perhaps that is another form of thinking outside the box: remembering that our own perspective is only one perspective.

We all look at the same world, but our location, our experiences and our point of view determine what we actually get to see. Sometimes a small shift in perspective reveals something extraordinary.

The hidden Bernina advertisement

When they started renovating the facade of a building, they discovered that underneath the outermost layer of the wall was an old advertisement for Bernina sewing machines painted in a wonderful retro style.

It had been there all along, just hidden from view. A nice reminder that there can be something unexpected underneath what we normally see.

The Gugelhopf

I came across this little scene in a private front yard: two chairs, a table, and on the table what looks like a permanent Gugelhopf, a traditional ring-shaped cake, apparently waiting for guests.

I have absolutely no idea what it's made of or why it's there. But it made me stop and wonder. And perhaps that's part of thinking outside the box, too: not immediately assuming that something is what it looks like.

The library return slot

This one is less whimsical and much more practical, although there was something above the door that I hadn't initially paid much attention to.

The former Latin schoolhouse in Zofingen, built in 1600–1602, is now the town library. Above its door is a Hebrew inscription: “A house of education in a living city.” Hebrew was one of the learned languages taught in schools of this kind, alongside Latin and Greek.

And below it, someone has found a very modern solution to a very ordinary problem: two slots for returning books and CDs, available even when the library is closed.

Instead of thinking “People can only return things when we're open,” someone thought: “Why do they have to?”

Four hundred years of thinking outside the box, all on one door.

Shout-out to my blogger friend Elisa and her Rabbi, as well as Google AI who helped translating! 

The IT company racetrack

And finally, my favourite example.

For our upcoming local trade show, we had to figure out how to attract people to our booth. As an IT service provider, we basically have computers. Not exactly the kind of product that makes people walking past stop in their tracks.

So a colleague came up with an idea: a car racetrack.

Visitors can enter a race by answering fun questions about our business. It has very little to do with our actual core business, and that's exactly the point. It will attract attention, get people involved and, most importantly, be fun.

Maybe that's what thinking outside the box really means.

Sometimes it's changing your perspective, looking underneath, questioning an assumption or finding a simple solution to a practical problem.

And sometimes it's putting a racetrack at an IT booth. 

You don't necessarily have to think differently. You just have to be willing to ask: “What if?”

BONUS: The Fourchette

I'm bending the rules a little with this one; I took this picture years ago. But it is simply too perfect for this month's theme to leave it in my archives.

Meet the Fourchette: almost 1,000 pounds of steel, 26 feet tall and 4 feet wide, the world's largest fork was installed in Lake Geneva in 1995 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Nestlé's Alimentarium (Museum of Nutrition and Food).

So it's been standing there for quite a while. And I was very happy to finally see this wonderfully ridiculous piece of public art in person a few years ago.

Because really: what could be more “thinking outside the box” than putting a gigantic fork in a lake?

I hope you enjoyed thinking outside the box with me. 

As always, don’t forget to check out the posts from my fellow bloggers participating in this month’s challenge!