Category: CreativityPage 1 of 3
I was taught to start my music practice by playing my scales. Starting with your scales: Starting with your scales doesn’t just apply to instruments. It applies to any…
Having ideas can be hard, especially when we already have a first idea. How do we trick our brain into thinking that we should go in search of…
In this post I share some initial thoughts on how using ChatGPT to generate ideas changes creative thinking for engineers, and other humans. My simple model for idea…
This month I am writing an article on that explores what if we restricted construction material use to those from a local catchment. Rather than a global supply…
I am a connoisseur of email-reduction strategies, so I share this for friends and colleagues of mine who I know are struggling with this at the moment. The…
When renewable systems are over exploited they fall into a desertlike state. In this state the system population is too low to support regrowth and the system structures…
I have nothing to say but lots to show you – Walter Benjamin. I heard this quote this morning on In Our Time and it really struck me….
Today at the University of Bath I am running a workshop on Analogue Skills for Design. This workshop fuses material from my conceptual design teaching with my observations…
‘Act it Out’ is my favourite technique for shifting creative thinking from the mind to the body. This post is another in my series on Turning the Kalideascope,…
What if you could present only using questions? Why might you want to? Well, do you want your answer to listen or to think? What is the most…
As I wrote in my last post, this summer I have been thinking about regenerative design, and what it means for engineers. In the context of climate breakdown,…
I have had the great fortune of having spent three weeks in France, a good portion of it cycling. Touring is a great way to leave behind your…
The disputable brief is a term I’ve coined to describe the bits of the brief that make your project worthwhile and different. It is easy to write a…
This week day equalled night. I see the seasons as sine and cosine waves. Peaks and troughs for different phenomena offset from one another. At the summer solstice,…
In my last post I asked how do I know if my ideas are any good? My answer was that a good idea is one that meets the…
It’s a simple question. When I ask people what they want to get out of a training course with me on design or creativity, a common answer is…
Today I’m sharing a principle of workshop design about how we gather feedback in workshops. But the principle also applies more widely to how we get feedback in…
For anyone attending one of my conceptual design training courses, the second question I ask is what is conceptual design*. In this post I’ll give the definition I…
One of the first questions I ask people in my conceptual design training is can you define design as a process. In this post I explore why describing…
For me the Designer’s Paradox is a key concept in helping people understand what the process of design is. The term was coined by my colleague at Think…
One way I use this blog is a jotter for ideas that I’m mulling over and discussing. By having all these musings in one place, I’m creating a…
I regularly ask this question on my ‘How to Have Better Ideas’ workshops (the sequel to ‘How to Have Ideas’). It’s a short question that triggers a wide…
You are in a state of flow. The next action flows from the previous. You are in the moment. Then boom, in comes an email that sets off…
When then there’s too much going on to do your creative work then merely create something. I picked up this term ‘merely’ concept from Seth Godin in this…
In my second post on building creative surplus – the time and energy we need to invest in creative thinking – I describe the OOOOOO, an approach for…
Creative surplus is what you invest in order to create new ideas. Like operating surplus – or profit – it is what is left over when an organisation…
Here’s four things you can do straight away to give your project a creative boost. Write down the brief. What are you trying to do? Who are you…
You are a world class performer at living your typical day. No one else has practised the precise set of habits, in the same precise sequence that makes…
Today I’m preparing for a session I’m giving at the University of Cambridge tomorrow on how to sell ideas. To help prepare, I’m going back through old posts…
Asking what if. It’s my go-to technique for stimulating rapid idea generation in groups. In this post, the latest in my series on creative thinking tools for projects,…