Each year, the gap between theoretical proposals and experimental endeavours to create quantum computers gets smaller, driven by the promise of fundamentally faster algorithms and quantum simulations. This occurs by the combination of experimental ingenuity and ever simpler theoretical schemes. This thesis comes from the latter perspective, aiming to find new, simpler ways in which components of a quantum computer could be built. We first search for ways to create quantum gates, the primitive building blocks of a quantum computer. We find a novel, low-control way of performing a two-qubit gate on qubits encoded in a decoherence-free subspace, making use of many-body interactions that may already be present. This includes an analysis of the effect of control errors and magnetic field fluctuations on the gate. We then present novel ways to create three-qubit Toffoli and Fredkin gates in a single step using linear arrays of qubits, including an assessment of how well these gates could perform, for quantum or classical computation, using state-of-the-art ion trap and silicon donor technology. We then focus on a very different model from the normal circuit model, combining ideas from measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) and holonomic quantum computation. We generalise an earlier model to show that all MBQC patterns with a property called gflow can be converted into a holonomic computation. The manifestation of the properties of MBQC in this adiabatically driven model is then explored. Finally, we investigate ways in which quantum information can be communicated between distant parties, using minimally engineered spin chains. The viability of using 1D Wigner crystals as a quantum channel is analysed, as well as schemes using ideal uniform spin chains with nextneighbour interactions, and edge-locking effects.