Uselessland: Anyone Can Create

8-Folk Co., Ltd.

Uselessland: Anyone Can Create

We are a creativity hub where fresh ideas, playful failures, and AI-powered tools build real skills.

Nonthaburi, Thailand

THA

For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models

Creativity, especially idea fluency and originality, is one of the most sought-after skills in the future labor market (The Future of Skills, NESTA, Oxford Martin School, and Pearson). Yet, tools to teach and assess creative-thinking abilities remain limited, inconsistent, and inaccessible, especially across Southeast Asia. This gap affects both students and working professionals. Many students, particularly in Thailand, have never been taught how to think creatively. In the 2022 PISA Creative Thinking assessment, Thai students scored below the international average, and the OECD ranked Thailand low in creativity-readiness. Meanwhile, professionals in design, marketing, and innovation-related fields often struggle with creative fatigue and lack structured ways to develop and assess their thinking. A teacher in rural Thailand shared this story with us: she asked students to create a new product using their family’s agricultural harvests. One student, whose family grows banana trees and sells deep-fried bananas, simply suggested deep-fried bananas as her ‘new’ idea. It was not a lack of effort. She simply did not know how to think differently. Many people in Thailand face the same challenge, and we want to change that.

Uselessland (www.uselessland.com) is a creative community where nothing productive happens. Everything seems silly, random, or 'useless' at first glance, but there is hidden value. It is a creative-thinking ecosystem where everyone can explore their ideas and build their skills. We make creativity visible, trackable, trainable, and fun(ny). Our current features and services include: - +Create: A space for users to record and showcase their ideas, innovations, prototypes, and even 'failed' projects. Every attempt sparks new thinking. This feature is built to be compatible with future integration of our creativity-assessment and feedback AIs. - Online Events: We host creative competitions to encourage experimentation and idea-sharing. - SparkPlus: A set of creative-thinking practice tools. We're currently testing an AI system that evaluates idea creativity with around 80% accuracy compared to certified human scorers. - Workshops: Both online and onsite, our workshops teach creative-thinking techniques to participants of all ages and backgrounds. - E-Training System: In development, this tool combines our AI assessments with workshop-based curricula for individualised, scalable creative-thinking training. To date, we have approximately 400 website members (we call them UTers), 558 inventions, and have welcomed over 200 participants to our workshops.

Uselessland is built to be accessible for everyone who wants to explore, understand, and grow their creative thinking. After some market testing, we currently serve two main groups: - Students, hobbyists, and lifelong learners who want to practice and build their creative-thinking skills in a fun and supportive environment - Professionals and teams aiming to sharpen their creative edge, learn about their thinking patterns, and cultivate new ideas Soon, we will also serve: - Individuals exploring their creative potential, even if they don’t yet see themselves as 'creative' - Organisations seeking scalable tools to assess, train, and grow creative capacity in employees On the individual level, Uselessland helps users develop creative-thinking skills, build confidence, and adopt a growth mindset. At a broader level, it fosters a culture of innovation by making creative development accessible beyond experts and elite institutions. In the long term, Uselessland aims to contribute to global creativity research by generating insights from large-scale, real-world creative thinking data.