Here’s four things you can do straight away to give your project a creative boost.

  1. Write down the brief. What are you trying to do? Who are you serving?
  2. Write as many things as you can about the project in a big piece of paper. I recommend using the following three headings as prompts: Information, Questions, Ideas. Stick it on the wall near where you work.
  3. Talk through your ideas with someone. Ask them just to listen and not say anything until you are done.
  4. Try to ignore the project for a day (I bet you can’t), and then the next day, write down five new ideas that will inevitably have emerged.

Of course there’s lots more that you can do but this creative boost is intended to get you thinking again when you don’t have any working momentum.

Step one re-engages us with the aims and also the criteria. These are both constraints but also opportunities for exploration. Step two gets us to render explicit lots of the little bits of information and fragments of ideas we have in our heads. This is the starting point for forming your project Kalideascope, that I have written lots about on this blog. Step three invokes the power speaking to shape thought, and the power of listening to give someone the space to think. And step four recognises the power of the sub-conscious. It’s like a slow cooker that you can set going before you go to bed and cooks up a delicious creative idea for breakfast. Bon appetite.

Want a bigger creative boost?

Check out my set of posts on this blog on creative thinking tools for projects and browse the courses I am delivering with partner organisations at Constructivist.