Posts Tagged ‘creativity’
The Analogy Game
The analogy game is a simple way to generate new ideas and solutions. You may have a tough problem or challenge. You might be analyzing a business, writing about leeks, or designing a prosthetic device. The analogy game takes you out of what you know—your area of expertise is also where your biases and blind spots flourish—and into areas that reshape what you know in surprising ways. Analogy games reveal fruitful next steps, additions, reconfigurations, or subtractions. They can lead to radically new ideas or extremely elegant solutions.
What You’ll Need
a stack of 3×5 cards, paper, pens, scissors, tape
Getting Ready
1. Cut 10 cards in half.
2. On each half, write one of these words: machine, organism, social relationship, hierarchy, network, ecosystem, country, equation, story, virus. This is your Analogy Card.
3. On one (and only one) card, describe your idea, problem or challenge. This is your Start Card.
Play!
Flip your Analogy Cards word-side down and shuffle them up. Draw a line down the center of a piece of paper.
Now flip over a card from your Analogy Deck and ask yourself, “How is my Start Card like the Analogy Card?” Tape the card at the top of the line down the middle of your piece of paper. Write your answers on the left and draw them on the right. Draw a reactance a few inches high and about page width after each answer. Repeat these steps for each Analogy Card.
Conversion: the Key to the Analogy Game
After working through an Analogy Card or all of them, walk through the sections on your paper and ask, “How can I incorporate this into my idea or solution? What is this saying about what I need to do or learn?” Write and draw answers to this in the rectangle you drew after each answer.
In groups: Each person does one analogy card. Results are shared in small groups. Groups share their conversions.
Variations: Time limits. Additional Analogy Cards. Using multiple Analogy Cards in each round. Writing or images only.
Analogy is often what takes innovators from point A to point B by way of points M, Z, and Q. Take the humble ink jet printer. (We won’t talk about the ink cartridge mafia and design decisions that make color ink jet and laser printers cheap to purchase but thirsty for ink and thus costly to maintain.) The printer moves the cartridge head in relation to the paper and squirts tiny drops of ink into precise locations.
ANALOGY 1: How is printing an object like printing a document? Result: additive manufacturing, 3D printing, and rapid prototyping.
ANALOGY 2: How is building a skin graft like printing a document? Result: Skin printing. An “ink” cartridge filled with skin substrate that “prints” a skin graft or bandage based on a 3D scan of the injury.
ANALOGY 3: How is building a road like printing a document? Result: Road printer.
Yes, you heard me, road printer. You know those nice patterned brick roads all over Europe? The ones that are more durable than asphalt and allow precipitation to more easily return to the water table? You can build these roads with a machine that rides over the graded area and prints road. The “print head” is made up of three or four people inserting bricks at the top of a road-width slide in the pattern that they want on the road. Due to the curvature of the slide, the bricks’ weight and gravity do the work of making them fit together snugly at the bottom of the slide where they arrive on the ground. http://www.tiger-stone.nl/index.php/multimedia/filmpjes
Analogy is one of many key tools in design and innovation. The more radical the analogy, the more likely we are to find ground-breaking solutions and ideas.
Idea Lab: Season 1 wrapped up this week. Housed snugly in Source DC’s conference room, each session worked through a different topic. The first session investigated thinking spaces.
Any space can be a thinking space, but thinking spaces are areas intended for thinking and creativity. Meeting rooms, workshops, laboratories, and artist studios are great thinking-space examples. These spaces are intended to shelter particular kinds of communication and creativity. The laboratory, workshop, and artist studio are usually well-suited to the mental and physical tasks of their inhabitants. Meeting rooms and collaboration areas in offices are usually dismal failures.
Offices are usually designed with command and control in mind. Areas where people come together usually have a dissemination locus with various reception fields. Most commonly, the dissemination locus is at the end of a long, rectangular table and just in front of a whiteboard or screen. The reception areas are pretty much everywhere else with a chair. You can find the dissemination locus by walking into a conference room and asking, “Where would the boss sit?”
This basic design problem, the dissemination-reception problem, affects the thinking that the space promotes, the nature of the ideas expressed, and how people respond to ideas. The dissemination-reception problem’s nuances are different for different groups, but one strategy that goes a long way is expanding the dissemination locus.
The dissemination locus can be expanded by:
1. Using modular furniture. Ditch the big rectangle for smaller tables that can be wheeled around or removed entirely. The room can then be reconfigured to match the ideas: classroom, small groups, round table, etc.
2. Whiteboard everywhere. There’s no point in having a surface in a meeting room (or office for that matter) that you can’t write on or easily post ideas on. Design firms know this. Our large corporate clients often do not. Wall-to-wall magnetic whiteboard costs a little more to build and maintain, but the ideas people create and share will pay for the investment. Plus, you’re paying for those walls, shouldn’t they be working for you.
These two solutions, along with an abundant supply of paper, pens, sticky notes, markers go a long way to making an office meeting room a real thinking space. Add a little collaboration and communication training, and people can fully escape the dissemination-reception trap.
Sketches, iterations, prototypes, working large, sketch walls, massive whiteboards—these are all part of the design thinking process. What does it look like when it all comes together? The video below shows sketches, massive whiteboards, prototypes, and how ideas develop and grow. It is from fueseproject’s (Yves Behar’s design studio) work in designing the new Sayl chair for Herman Miller.
After more than 70 prototypes and extensive testing, the Sayl chair emerged using fewer components than similar chairs, costing less than Herman Miller’s Aeron and Embody chairs, wearing Herman Miller’s 12-year warranty, and bursting with design choices around sustainability. Sayl is a great chair inspired by the Golden Gate Bridge, but it is also the tangible representation of the design thinking process and visual thinking tools used in creating it.
Creative processes often resemble or require studying. The New York Times printed a great article about good study habits that run contrary to common beliefs about how we learn.
Mix it up. Mixed practice is better than working a single type of problem. We need to learn how to identify which skill to apply and how to apply the skill.
Move around. A variety of locations is better than a single location. Changing study locations increases retention. Environments with a view are even better.
Once more, with feeling. Spaced repetition works. Long-term retention is better supported by gradual, repeated study than cramming.
Understanding your resources and the challenges you face requires study. These ideas can make the problem solving process faster, easier, and more effective.
Seeing, solving and acting are the essential components of everything you do.
Better thinking improves and accelerates how you see, solve and act. Learn more.
