Category: Teaching notesPage 1 of 2
This post is still under construction. In this post I am linking together the best of my material on facilitation tools for engineers (and other humans). To facilitate…
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,…
Changing the key system is a technique I teach to help people develop new ideas when their thinking has become stuck. It’s one of my techniques for ‘turning…
Yesterday I was writing about what to do after declaring a biodiversity emergency. My conclusions was that the process starts with rethinking our relationship to our ecosystem. Not…
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…
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…
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…
I picked up this tip at home yesterday – thanks Mary. It’s a formula for getting to the point when writing emails. What do you want the person…
Facilitation means making something easier. It isn’t about controlling; it’s about following, listening and enabling. In a workshop setting, it’s about having the confidence to let go of…
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,…
We move now in my series of posts on tools for creative thinking from gathering inputs to stimulating new connections. This is what I call ‘Turning the Kalideacope‘….
There are some inputs to our creative process that we build up over time so that we are ready to draw on them whenever we work on a…
We need creative thinking tools in our project toolkit to get the most out the opportunities that a new project offers. Projects provide a setting in which people…
Together, the people around you know so much more than you do. In my last post for now on Filling the Kalideacope – gathering inputs for the creative…
Humans tend be to attracted to novelty – Oo, the shiny new thing – but sometimes what we need is in what we know already. This post is…
This post is another in my series about inputs to the creative process, what I call ‘Filling the Kalideascope‘. Today’s input is visiting the site, and it cuts…
My starting point for gathering inputs to a creative project is the working brief. The technique that I use with participants in my workshops is what I call…
Yesterday I wrote about the inputs you might gather at the start of a creative project. These are what I call inputs in the moment. But there is…
In my last post I described the Kalideascope as a tool for having ideas. You fill it with inputs and then turn it to create new the connections…
In this third video in my series on creative thinking, I go into the concept of curating inputs to the creative process. The combination of our brain and…
In my last post I cited James Webb Young’s definition of an idea as being a new arrangement of existing elements. He goes on to suggest having an…
This week I have begun creating a series of videos to share my teaching on how to have ideas. The videos start with what simple question, what is…
It is tempting to think of a design brief as wholly reliable, a document that contains all the information necessary to execute the design. But design briefs are…
Superpowers for Creative Design is the name I gave to a one-page summary of my undergraduate creativity teaching at Imperial College. This is my first draft. I like…