Product designers use foam to mock up products all the time. But it's not the first thing you think of using for UI design. Yet, it was a perfect material for teachers to use to prototype a video player. Add to that a tested method for brainstorming ideas and you can quickly dash (or SCAMPER*) to your next great idea.

Here is the process I used with ten teachers—with widely varying degrees of tech savvy—to create a video player and customize it in the space of a half hour. Why foam? Because it was immediate and non-threatening. The teachers looked at it as a craft project. We started with where they are, not where we want them to be. Taking the tech out of it put them at ease and produced some remarkable results.

1. Each participant was given a bag with a variety of pieces of foam, from an art supply store, in various geometric shapes and colors.

2. To introduce the exercise I asked them not to invent but to reinvent. This is an important idea to emphasize to minimize the fear of creating we all share. Reinvention is the primary means we arrive at a new idea or product. Most ideas are evolutionary, not revolutionary. I began the with the story of the Honorary Chairman of SONY Akio Morita and his idea to combine two devices to create a new entertainment product. SONY engineers had shelved a project that they believe had failed: the smallest possible stereo tape recorder. Chairman Morita saw the potential of this tape player when combined with another new idea—light weight headphones—and the SONY Walkman was born. "This is the product that will satisfy those young people who want to listen to music all day. They'll take it everywhere with them, and they won't care about record functions." The Walkman led to the iPod—and It was easy to find one of those in the room.

This post began sometime last week: I was in a meeting and the subject of links opening in new windows came up. Somebody was noting how it had caused a user problems on a certain site. Internally, I flew into a rage. IT'S TWO-THOUSAND-@#$%ing-NINE, more than two millennia since Jesus first came to earth to tell people not to use target="_blank" on their links, and we're still dealing with this crap?

Like any mature adult, I dealt with this by throwing together a bookmarklet to express my rage and righteous damnation of all links that open in a new window. You, too, may use the fruits of that indignation by dragging the Link Witch Hunt to your bookmarks toolbar. Use it to conduct a witch hunt on any page you're viewing to scour it for offensive links. If the site passes, it gets a benevolent green congratulatory message. If it does not, however, the severity of its offense will be judged and all links angrily flagged for the world to see.

With this tool in one hand and a torch burning in the other, I went in search of particularly offensive sites. Our own PBS.org was quickly burned, Facebook's sins were even more flagrant, and--naturally--the sites of a few of my web gurus were revealed to be utterly pristine.

I must admit I shed a few tears when I had to tie Twitter to the stake, too.

Over the weekend, all of this burning and damnation caused me to reflect on a few things. Did I really have the right attitude about links that opened in a new window? Were they as bad as I felt they were? Were they equally bad in all instances?