During my time working closely with academics in the Faculty of Engineering and IT, I have often been struck by the similarity between engineers and artists. They are both compelled to create things and must judge if their creation is working. If it’s not, they have to find a solution to fix it. The process of building a robot, designing a medical device or inventing an information system model has much in common with the process of creating a work of art. Creativity and originality are required in many fields and students from any discipline can benefit from learning how to develop these qualities. It is also beneficial if students can break away from believing that there is a single ‘correct’ solution for a project.
Full-time creatives need to be able to generate ideas at will and interrogate them for quality. If they are ‘blocked’, they need to become unstuck. So how do they do it? Well, you can wait around for inspiration, but as Australian author, Thomas Keneally once said, “Inspiration is for hacks!”. Let’s have a look at three techniques – from the creative worlds of screenwriting, design, and music.
Idea generation
Screenwriting expert Linda Aronson advises that the key to generating an original idea is to brainstorm uncritically. Her technique references Edward de Bono’s concept of lateral thinking. She suggests that when you want to produce an idea for a story, you brainstorm 20 ideas without judgement. The first 15 will be obvious ideas or cliches, but by persisting there may be something of greater originality and value by the time you reach 20.
Brainstorming is simply a tool, like a pencil. It’s simply a way to trick the suppressed lateral imagination out into the open, to force it to make new and exciting connections.
Linda Aronson
She recommends that one should relax, and “put your inner critic aside, or you will block”. More details can be found in Aronson’s blog post Should you give up on a film script and write something new?
Idea interrogation
Design thinking has been utilised for some time in many disciplines, especially in business and entrepreneurship studies. One useful tool to test an idea for quality is the ‘Value Proposition Template.’ This is often used to interrogate ideas for products or services to see if they add value to people’s lives or have a real purpose and therefore have a market, but it could be used to interrogate ideas in many fields.
The template reads:
Our [products and services] help(s) [customer segment] who want to [jobs to be done] by [verb e.g. reducing, avoiding] [and a customer pain] and [verb e.g. reducing, avoiding] [and a customer pain], unlike [competing value proposition].
It can be remarkably difficult to fill in this template, but it exposes conceptual gaps or flaws in the functionality of the idea. Those gaps or flaws may require redesign, but the Value Proposition Template is a good test to apply to an idea early on to see if it would be worthwhile. This can save a lot of time, money, and heartache.
Becoming unstuck
Legendary rock music producer Brian Eno and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt developed a set of prompts to help break through blocks in the creative process, which Eno used while producing music. The prompts are a series of cryptic statements on a card deck called ‘Oblique Strategies’, such as ‘Your mistake was a hidden intention.’ The statements are designed to be open to interpretation, which is why they can be so useful. For instance, a band was asked to each pull a card, and play according to their interpretation of that statement. A key to their deployment is timing – a card means different things at different times and in different contexts. The intention is to help people break through thought habits or get out of a conceptual cul-de-sac and is a type of instant reflection stimulus.
Here is a helpful overview:
The card deck can be expensive! Fortunately, Oblique Strategies has an online version you can offer students in your Canvas site.
What could any of these cards mean at critical points in your project? How might they apply to your discipline?
True grit
These techniques support persistence and iteration, for which there can be no substitute. It is worth meditating on the story of Thomas Edison, who went through an incredible 6,000 iterations when developing the lightbulb, before he found a filament that worked. Somehow, he remained motivated to keep breaking habits of mind and trying new ideas. Thanks, Thomas!
Resources
Feature image by Johannes Plenio