Virtual Mood Wall

I've been thinking a bit about mood boards, a visual inspiration tool mostly used by designers. The idea is that you put up a collage of related images and concepts surrounding something you want to think about. If you do it right, it lets you sort of soak in all these various associations and hopefully make it easier to come up with new related ideas.

That's roughly the idea behind my (currently neglected) idea globe, but I think a more visual form might be interesting to pursue. You could make a big virtual wall with various clippings, images, animations, videos, etc, and have the whole thing iterate and evolve over time. There was an old piece of software called Debris Visual Art that had a kind of similar evolving idea, but this would need to be a bit more, uh, structured.

There are some advantages of this virtual kind of mood board over the physical one. Obviously, the possibility of using video and other dynamic stuff within the panels is one, but I think the real benefit is that the whole thing is dynamic. If your goal is to form new connections and come up with ideas, randomness seems like an important attribute. As each panel changes over time, you would end up with combinations of the mood elements you hadn't considered before.