Looking for fuel for your creative engine: try these 6 exercises.

Stuck in an ideas slump? Here are another 6 exercises to help you build creative momentum and deliver something new.

Rarely do brilliant ideas appear out of the blue. In his book “How to Have Great Ideas: A Guide to Creative Thinking” (Laurence King, 2016), John Ingledew—a photographer and visiting professor at the London School of Film, Media, and Design at the University of West London—shares 53 practical strategies to help readers unlock innovative ideas. Whilst written for those working across marketing fields I see this books as a valuable jargon-free resource for everyone, packed with relevant cast studies and fun, useful exercises.

Here are my 6 favourites:

1. BE PLAYFUL

To a child, a simple cardboard box has unlimited possibilities – as a car, plane, house, fort, post box, boat, skyscraper, spaceship, robot costume, etc. A stick or piece of wood is a Star Wars lightsaber, a knight’s sword or a baseball bat. By being playful with any objects, words or materials you are presented with, you can reveal lots of different ideas and alternatives.

Rediscover playtime – that period at school when the clock always seemed to run at a different speed. You can become lost in play. It is joyful and carefree; the ordinary rules of daily life are temporarily suspended and the form and scale of objects are overthrown and happily ignored. Some creative companies and experimental education programmes have learnt a lot from this. Sidelining computers and building work environments with plenty of access to construction and modelling materials so that ideas can swiftly become objects. They set out to create an environment of shared space, and the liberated feeling of playtime in which your role as a participant is simply to mess around freely with a project and toy with ideas.

Project: Play hide and seek with the words around you. Seek out words hidden with works. Capture and collect on your favourite platform. As a group activity, spend 15 minutes looking for words and share on a white board. Then build a story, perhaps a fable that uses all the hidden words you have captured.

For this to be successful you need to be in a playful state of mind and feel that others are valued playmates rather than colleagues.

2. TAKE NOTICE

“Creative people are expert noticers,” observed science professor Guy Claxton. They have highly developed abilities in visual foraging—spotting, gathering, and utilizing things that most others overlook. Having an active rather than idle curiosity about the world around you reveals ideas. Be nosy, be “eyesy.”. And take advantage of the phone camera to collect those images of your day, then collate and curate them on your favourite platform.

Project: Take 15 minutes every day for a week to search out and collect the faces, animals, letterforms, and numbers that are accidentally created by wear, repair, time, decay, spillage, breakage, update, replacement, light, shadow, rain, or snow. To see things afresh, try taking a different route to somewhere you often go, or travel by a different means; break your usual pattern, go slower, go faster – you will see things differently – some things may only reveal themselves when you look at them sideways, upside down, or in reverse.

“The worthiest works of all often reflect an artful creativity that looks more like play than work” James Ogilvy, author of Living without a Goal

3. KEEP IT SIMPLE

Problems are often obscured by an overload of information. Clarify and isolate the challenge you face by spending time understanding and defining the problem. The process of simplicity takes time and iteration. Each review you need to identify the excess baggage and continue to prune what is providing distraction. Can you simplify it down to 10 words, 5 words, or even 3?

Project: Writer Ernest Hemingway famously laid down a challenge to write a story in six words. His tale was simply. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” A quick google search will identify many of the platforms sharing their six-word stories. Try it, or update this to a Twitter challenge and write an entire story in just 140 characters. Pick a topic or a concept and see how many stories you can tell. A good place to start is the story of your life.

4. ASK “WHAT ELSE CAN I DO WITH THIS?”

We see most things—objects, buildings, spaces, materials, technology, and systems—through the lens of habit and familiarity. We take them for granted, overlooking numerous other possibilities. Combat the mind’s tendency to assume that something can only function in a familiar way. Asking yourself “What else can I do with this?” will lead to new discoveries and ideas.

Project: Turn rubbish into gold—take all the junk mail that comes through your letter box and turn it into something of great value. What else can you do with a newspaper? For that collection of CD’s weighed down by the years of dust.

5. FROM THIS TO THAT “SWAPPING SYSTEMS”

Applying a ready-made, successful, tried and trusted existing system from one area of practice to another can lead to great innovation. Inventor Owen Maclaren created the first collapsible baby buggy by utilizing the system designed for the folding undercarriages of Spitfire planes from World War II. James Dyson used cyclone systems used to suck up sawdust in sawmills and applied them to the home vacuum. Both revolutionized previously entrenched designs. If you find a current system disappointing or inadequate, try borrowing one from another field.

Project: In a world full of inspired interior design, how often do you think a change of scenery in your living space would provide a refreshing change. Take the quick-change systems of theatre scenery and apply them to rethink your living or work space. Pick a room and create your own quick-change model.

6. REPOSITION

The act of altering how something is viewed can reveal new possibilities and ideas. This can be achieved by seeking every possible viewpoint and shifting context—by taking things from their usual home and placing them somewhere completely different.

Boxes of wire scrubbing pads and cans of soup are familiar items in a supermarket. There are unmade beds in every teenager’s bedroom, and dead cows and sheep can be found in the back of every butcher’s shop. But put them in an art gallery and they are big news.

Nearly 100 years ago, Marcel Duchamp was the first artist to realize that such repositioning could have an impact when his submission to an art exhibition of a porcelain urinal laid flat on its back cause an enormous scandal. Considered ‘readymade’ art- rather than ‘retinal’ art this form uses materials that have not been fundamentally changed.

Project: Make the unremarkable remarkable—look at the items around your desk and gather 4 everyday items. Look out how they can fit together to become something useful, or simply something visually appealing.

Consider how you can restructure them, or reproduce. Paperclips reformed into letters, pens becoming trucks on a sketch of a forest.

Make it personal

Whether you try one or all these challenges, or use them to inspire other ideas, the best approach is to use things from your own life and experience to spark ideas—things you know about yourself or your family, and things from your background. As Al Jean, one of the original writers of The Simpsons, says,

“You get ideas from real life. Teachers you had, problems your kids are going through, things that happened to you as a kid, things you read in the paper.”

Want to know what else you can find in this practical and fun approach to rebooting your creative ability, check out “How to have great ideas: a guide to creative thinking”

This review of the book "How to have great ideas guide to creative thinking" (Laurence King, 2016) by John Ingledew has been co-published at https://www.sparkover.com.au/creative-thinking

Other related content that looks into how to build teams for high levels of creative ability include:

Leaders agree: CREATIVITY joins top 3 work skills by 2020

My 5 top tips for getting out of your creative cage

Yes, you are a creative thinker!

For details on 1/2 day and full day workshops : https://www.sparkover.com.au/reboot-workshop