Suitable for individuals and teams – 10-20 minutes
At the heart of every problem is a need. Very often this need occurs in
many other circumstances. This technique expands thinking by looking at
other areas where this need might occur.
The first thing to do is to identify the essential need in your problem,
or at least one of the fundamentals. For instance, if you are trying to
design seating, your essential need might be comfort, it might be style,
or even fireproofing. Next think of three examples of this need in a
different area. Taking style, we could think of clothes de-sign, car
design and the club scene as examples where style is important.
Finally, relate the external areas back to the problem. How can we apply
clothes design to seating? An easy answer is to put whatever is
happening on the catwalks on to our seats. From car design, we could
focus on the centre of gravity — putting the driver at the heart of the
seat. We could focus on streamlining. We could even take an inapplicable
area of car design, like fuel efficiency, and ask how this could be
applied. (An efficient build process for the seating would minimize
effort in sitting and rising, or building a table into the seat would
make human fuel intake easier.)
Getting down to a lower level of need can be an effective way of
by-passing some self-imposed obstacles. Looking outside is an
established means of generating ideas; this technique helps to select
the area of focus.
Once the essential need is established, you will have little trouble
applying the technique. You may have trouble identifying the central
need — if so, settle for the most fundamental need you can find.
You could try combining needs. Given the seating example above, we could
combine fashion design with old slippers (comfort) and try to find an
area of stimulation in this. This is tougher to do and you might want to
become experienced with the technique before doing so.
Creativity
requires spending time "doing nothing" - workaholism guarantees its
death
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To learn about the 12 types of intelligences, send an email to
bs@futurevisions.org with
"free MWS 12
intelligence types" in the subject line and nothing in the body.
