A business card designed to sprout alfalfa when exposed to water and sunlight. The idea was simple: give potential employers something they’d keep on their desk rather than lose in their wallet. It was a student project, it opened a few doors, and then I filed it away and got on with my career.

That was over fifteen years ago. I’m still fielding enquiries about it every month.

The questions are always the same: “how was it built?” (Two slabs of plastic, alfalfa seeds, and an absorbent core.) “Did it actually work?” (Most of the time, with gentle persuasion.) And my favourite: “how much would it be to order X of them?” — a recent email from a European government requested 10,000.

So why does a student project from fifteen years ago keep finding new audiences? I think the answer lies in format.

Everyone gets business cards. Not just understands them — gets them in the joke sense. The construct is so universally known that any subversion of it lands immediately: no explanation required, no context needed. A card that grows plants instead of sitting in a drawer is effectively a setup and punchline in a single object. The joke tells itself.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that this made it structurally perfect for social media. The best-performing content on any platform shares one quality: it does all the cognitive work for you. A single image, a single idea, immediate comprehension. No friction between the thing and the reaction it produces. My business card was a dopamine hit before dopamine hits were a design consideration.

The lesson isn’t really about business cards. It’s that the most shareable ideas live inside formats people already understand. Subvert the expected just enough to produce surprise — but keep the setup familiar enough that everyone gets the punchline without having to think about it. Remove the work, and the idea travels on its own.