A SURPLUS is printed. The originator decides how many copies of their SURPLUS should be in circulation – signing and numbering each. Working with scarcity in this way honours the sanctity of ideation and acknowledges that an originator might not want to give away their work to just anyone.

It also enables a SURPLUS market, where you can buy, sell and consider certain SURPLUS purchases as proper investments. Who wouldn’t want the SURPLUS of creators like Virgil Abloh, Amrita Sher-Gil, Frank Zappa, Wang Zhenyi and other creators who ran out of time before having a chance to fully materialise their minds?

As it’s not unusual for highly creative people to choose artistic paths with financial insecurity, the option to sell a SURPLUS presents an important way to price more of the value in a creative’s mind. Buying someone’s SURPLUS can be a way to offer patronage. Furthermore, if you have someone’s SURPLUS, you can show it to connected people you encounter, to further promote the work of a creative you believe in.

Some creatives might not want to sell their SURPLUS, but rather choose to share it only with people they assess are good fits to take the ideas forward. Others might share their SURPLUS as an inheritance, only with their children. Or give it away to close friends or lovers as a way of trusting someone with a previously hidden part of your life – not unlike inviting someone into your home.

SURPLUS is for those with an abundance of ideas, and for those who want to realise excellent ideation.

It’s also a format for those who like to feel connected to their favourite creatives. A band could, for example, publish a tour-specific SURPLUS: collecting the ideas they’ve birthed while being on the road, asking their fans to materialise the concepts and show them the results. Whether a matter of starting a company, cooking a meal or getting a tattoo that your favourite artists have dreamt up, the connection surpasses the intimacy that owning another band t-shirt could ever offer.

Furthermore, SURPLUS is particularly relevant for people who are locked into a brand. The most serious public academic might have significant bubblegum-related ideation that they’re not bringing forward, as doing so would undermine their official persona. The SURPLUS format comes with an acknowledgement that sometimes the wrong person gets the right idea. When that happens, the best course is sharing the concept, so someone more befitting can bring it about. Meaning, it’s more than okay to be entirely off-brand in one’s SURPLUS – it’s actually expected.

The word “affable” is used as a qualifier of which kind of ideas fit into a SURPLUS. War technology and ideas related to ways of hurting, exploiting or fooling sentient beings do not. Some ideas, like dynamite, were introduced as affable but ended up in detrimental weaponry. Originators are cautioned to think about possible hurtful applications of their ideas and to publish with caution. This is especially critical in fields related to synthetic biology and AI, where potentially lethal ideation is currently underway.

Lastly, the SURPLUS format is intended for those who would like to consume ideas, as they would any other art form. Ideas remind us that the world isn’t finished and that it can be de- and reconstructed through continuous innovation.

SURPLUS is a brand-new format whose benefits multiply with notoriety. Therefore, if you like the SURPLUS concept, you are more than welcome to help spread it.

If you have an audience, you can communicate the existence of SURPLUS through your platform – possibly making and selling a SURPLUS of your own, and/or urging the idea-abundant people in your audience to make and show you theirs.

If you are an agent, manager, or in other ways, have access to idea-abundant people, you can prompt those to make a SURPLUS, possibly as a means of promotion, or as content to promote in its own right.

If you are in publishing, you can create a line-up of relevant people’s SURPLUS and distribute them in some more or less exclusive edition. Particularly when a creator is nearing the end of their life, this can be an addition to the collection of finished work, a way to capture the value of ideas that never became fully formed, but carry the creator’s mode and brilliance none the less.

If you are in event management, and about to organise a festival or the like with many speakers, you can ask each for their SURPLUS, and offer to sell it, be it at an exclusive auction or more widely. Alternatively, you can ask the speakers for one SURPLUS idea each, assembling an event-specific SURPLUS and provide it to the audience in the staple goodie bag.

If you are anything else, you can reach out to journalists, talk to your friends – off- or online – and reach out directly to people whose SURPLUS you would like to see or buy. The latter could be done by tagging creatives on social media, or asking them about their SURPLUS when you encounter them in person. You can also host a gathering where idea-abundant acquaintances are invited to create their SURPLUS under pleasant circumstances. Whether individual volumes or as a joint edition – a friend group or creative collective can indeed pool their ideas into a collaborative SURPLUS.

Given wide adoption, marketplaces, where people sell their SURPLUS, can emerge, as can exhibitions where living and dead creatives build a bridge to kindreds across time and space.

Glimpse into a future where the first editions of SURPLUS are on display, and the history of ideas from the past can inspire further ideation and realisation.

Anyone with abundant ideas can create a SURPLUS. To keep the format recognisable, adhere to the following basics:

• Use a stapled A5 format. Put an image that represents you on the cover, along with the title and subtitle, which you can download as an image here.

• Make the SURPLUS 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28 or 32 pages. If your ideas are too plentiful to fit that restriction, consider making several volumes.

• Strive to use one page or spread for each idea. Add whatever images, business plans, marketing ideas and mockups you think will help or inspire others to bring the ideas about.

• Use whatever fonts and aesthetics fit the atmosphere of your ideas. If you don’t know anything about templates and the like but still want to give your ideas proper framing, consider turning to a professional, be it through Fiverr, Upwork or someone you know.

• Include contact details and/or guidelines regarding credit etc. This can include a Creative Commons licence or a simple statement that declares that the person who has obtained your SURPLUS must get your explicit consent before developing a certain idea further. There is naturally always the risk that someone who gets their hand on a certain SURPLUS uploads it and spreads it in ways the originator did not intend. The originator is to share their SURPLUS, and articulate its terms, with that in mind. This extends to informing the person who receives the SURPLUS about any possible honour code they are assumed to observe.

• Sign your SURPLUS and number each copy in the artist’s standard format “1/200” (if you’re signing the first out of 200 printed copies).

The SURPLUS concept is developed by the governance futurist, cyborg artist and writer Corin Ism.

“It took me a long time to learn how to handle my mind. When I was younger, I felt a moral responsibility to put in the work to materialise each of the ideas that would come to me. I often ended up stressed and very thinly spread. Like many idea-abundant people, the expectation of being a brand incentivised me to prioritise. In my case, and in later years, that has meant working only on ideation related to governance and foresight.

Even so, ideas that don’t connect to those topics keep coming, and some of them hold potential of a magnitude that makes throwing them away unreasonable. Knowing this kind of waste conundrum is common, and that many creative friends of mine go through similar challenges, I finally figured I’d put my ideating mind to the task of ideating concepts related to ideation. As meta as it gets.

I came up with two solid concepts. One is the SURPLUS format for idea-sharing that require scarcity and trust. The other one – which is focused on digital means and ideation in the public domain – you can read all about in my personal SURPLUS.”

You can request Corin Ism’s SURPLUS by sending an email to [email protected].