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I previously blogged about the Glimmerati, the list of talented and driven design thinkers who helped guide me through the thickets of design to write Glimmer. Well, there was a whole other group I encountered along my Glimmer journey, which was in many ways as inspiring and fascinating as the Glimmerati. These were the people I ended up calling "Basement Buckys," after that glorious futurist and designer R. Buckminster Fuller.

As the name suggests, these are people toiling away in their basements or garages designing solutions to problems that are plaguing them or someone they know. Most of the ones I profile in Glimmer may not be famous by name, but they created some wonderful products or solutions, often starting with a "glimmer moment." For instance, the Java Jacket, that now ubiquitous recycled-paper sleeve that goes around paper coffee cups? That came about because Jay Sorensen burned his fingers and dropped a cup of hot coffee in his lap one day while driving his daughter to school. It took a lot of iterations and experiments but he eventually came up with that paper holder, and now, a billion sleeves later, the rest is history. And if you see plastic pill bottles in different colors and sizes, thank Deborah Adler who caught her grandparents mistakenly taking each others' medication. She realized that all those identical brown pill bottles in the medicine cabinet made for dangerous mix-ups, and went to work redesigning them.

Then there's Mark Noonan who got fed up finally with hurting his back shoveling snow, and devised the Wovel, a smart recombination of a shovel, a bicycle wheel, and a lever. Or Gauri Nanda, a student who could never wake up in the morning, and created the Clocky, a cute alarm clock on wheels that rolls off your nightstand forcing you to get out of bed and chase it to turn off its beeping. The Clocky, available now in four colors, is also sold in iconic stainless-steel splendor by the MoMA design store.

The stories of the basement Buckys I met include some famous people like the rock ‘n' roll icon David Byrne, who these days is designing everything from chairs to bicycle racks, and actress Jamie Lee Curtis who years ago designed and patented a better diaper. What's evident from all of this is creativity is that deep down all of us are designers. In Glimmer I offer ways to get in touch with that designer inside of you, so maybe you can be the next one to come up with a life-changing solution.

Warren Berger, Glimmer, Design Week, Penguin Press, problem solving