Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition refers to the stimulation of creativity in problem solving, design or other creative pursuit by confronting two unrelated concepts of objects , usually the goal or problem to be solved on one hand and a randomly selected object or concept on the other.

For example,

Step 1:

Flower Head

Lighting Rain

Ice Wood

Light Tree

Fire Spider

Duck Root

Dog Mountain

Oil Wind

Leave Rock

Fly Water

Step 2:

Choose 3 pairs of numbers from 00-99

And I chose 13, 89, 00.

Step 3:

1 Flower 0 Head

2 Lighting 9 Rain

3 Ice 8 Wood

4 Light 7 Tree

5 Fire 6 Spider

6 Duck 5 Root

7 Dog 4 Mountain

8 Oil 3 Wind

9 Leave 2 Rock

0 Fly 1 Water

Step 4:

13 = Flower + Wind

89 = Oil + Rain

00 = Fly + Head

Exercise 1:

Create a sentence by using the two random words

1. The flower drop from the plant because of the wind.

2. I was carrying the cooking oil while running in the rain.

3. The paper fly over my head.

Exercise 2:

1. The flower drop from the plant because of the wind.

2. I was carrying the cooking oil while running in the rain.

3. The paper fly over my head.

Exercise 3:

1. flowerwind

2. oilrain

3. flyhead

Mind Mapping: Associates Mindmapping

Associates Mindmapping is different than Logical Mindmapping. Associates Mindmapping can make people more creative in terms of their thinking and ideation. Associates Mindmapping will link the main subject to a entire new idea that are totally not connected to stereotypes and might be not logical.

For example, in class my lecturer want us to link Mortar and Pestle with a few subjects that is totally not related. Among the subjects I chose Power, Hair/Fashion, and Devil.

POWER

People use the mortar and pestle to choose their leader. Whoever is able to break the mortar by using the pestle is believed to have special power and will be elected to become the leader of the community.

HAIR/FASHION

Girls or even some boys are using the mortar and pestle as the accessories on their hair. This is the latest fashion that favor by most of the teenagers. They put the mortar on their head and use it like a hat, and curl their hair with the pestle.

DEVIL

Some people use the mortar and pestle to kill or chase the devil away. In their religion, they believe that by using the mortar to trap the devil in it and the pestle to hit on the floor around the mortar will send the devil back to hell.

This is how I link these unrelated subjects with mortar and pestle. And this is how a Associates Mindmapping works.

Mind Mapping: Logical Mindmapping

This is the Logical Mindmapping that I did. It is titled as "What is in a Girl's Mind?". As you can see from the picture a girl's mind contain a few important subjects for them such as fashion, gossip, rival, boys, BFF, sales. But for those words that have a red cross across them are those subjects that are not in a girl's mind such as games, sense of direction, sex, securerity, IT sense and cars.

Logical Mind Map is always connected with stereotypes. A stereotype is a commonly held public belief about specific social groups, or types of individuals. The rules of Logical Mindmapping is to always have your subject in the center of the page. The characteristics of the Logical Mindmapping are non-emotive words and image, logical and make sense, serious, linearity and analysis.

What Symbolized Me?

Well, this is what my friend, Eddy, thinks that symbolized me. The reason he choose a lighting light bulb to symbolize me because this also symbolize new ideas. He said that I always have a lot of ideas which is different than others. Besides, he also said that light bulb indicates light which light up his life. (well, actually Eddy is my boyfriend just in case you are wondering)

Inventors vs Boundary Breakers

INVENTORS - those who take existing knowledge and create new ideas

Thomas Edison

(1847 - 1931)

Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio. With only three months of formal education he became one of the greatest inventors and industrial leaders in history. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb.

Edison is considered one of the most prolific inventors in history, holding 1,093 U.S. patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. His advanced work in these fields was an outgrowth of his early career as a telegraph operator. Edison originated the concept and implementation of electric-power generation and distribution to homes, businesses, and factories – a crucial development in the modern industrialized world. His first power station was on Manhattan Island, New York.

Source from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison

BOUNDARY BREAKERS - the rarest group

Leonardo da Vinci

(1452 - 1519)

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian polymath, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote".

Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.

Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy,civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.

Source from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci

What Makes You a Creative Person

Nearly every creative person I know has experienced the question, often asked by someone with a blank, slightly-confused look: why do you do that? Why do you take all those photos, or scribble notes everywhere, or make birthday cards by hand? Why do you knit, or make quilts, or paint with watercolors, or make sculpture from scrap? Why do you want to write a novel or make a film? Some people ask these questions out of innocent curiosity, because they’ve just never experienced such impulses. But from other people, the tone can be vaguely threatening — even menacing.It seems that what they’re really saying is: “What gives you the right? What makes you important enough to do that? Who do you think you are?

What is creativity? Why are creative people often different than others? And what makes you a creative person?

Creative Intelligence is the ability to think in new ways, to be original and where necessary stand apart from the crowd. Creativity is also an attitude: the ability to accept change and newness, a willingness to play with ideas and possibilities, a flexibility of outlook, the habit of enjoying the good, while looking for ways to improve it. We are socialized into accepting only a small number of permitted or normal things, like chocolate-covered strawberries, for example. The creative person realizes that there are other possibilities, like peanut butter and banana sandwiches, or chocolate-covered prunes.

Creative people work hard and continually to improve ideas and solutions, by making gradual alterations and refinements to their works. Contrary to the mythology surrounding creativity, very, very few works of creative excellence are produced with a single stroke of brilliance or in a frenzy of rapid activity. Much closer to the real truth are the stories of companies who had to take the invention away from the inventor in order to market it because the inventor would have kept on tweaking it and fiddling with it, always trying to make it a little better. The creative person knows that there is always room for improvement.

Creativity requires four things-

• Fluency - the speed and ease with which you can "rattle off" new and creative ideas.

• Flexibility - your ability to see things from different angles and from opposite points of view. To take old concepts and rearrange them in new ways and to reverse current ideas. It's also about using your senses i.e. what you see, hear, feel, touch, taste, smell in developing new thinking.

• Originality - being able to produce ideas that are unique, unusual and eccentric or different.

• Expand ideas - being able to build on, develop, embellish and elaborate upon thoughts and concepts.

We all have the ability to be creative by using our right brains but we are also good at blocking it by limiting our thinking and believing there is only one way to look at things, or sometimes we reject ideas outright because we can't see how they will work.

Random word, picture or object

When you are working on a problem, select a random word, picture or object from your office and write down a list of words that spring to mind as you reflect on it's purpose, colour, texture, shape, size, movement and surroundings. Now review what you have written down and see if it generates any new thoughts or ideas that might help with your problem.

Develop your senses

We make sense and communicate through our senses and the more we develop them the more we are able to associate and find connections between apparently unrelated things e.g. a frog and school bus - they both need water to keep them cool and they both have eyes! Add your own!

When you are outside see if you can spot 15 different colours and textures of green. And the next time you listen to a song see if you pick out the instruments and vocalists. You can give your taste buds a test by trying to guess the ingredients of a surprise meal. Close you eyes and imagine you were blind, can you find the things on your desk easily? Give your brain a challenge by wearing your watch on the other hand for just one day. You will be amazed at how it develops your sense of touch and feeling.

Learning to be Creative

Much of the thinking done in formal education emphasizes the skills of analysis--teaching students how to understand claims, follow or create a logical argument, figure out the answer, eliminate the incorrect paths and focus on the correct one. However, there is another kind of thinking, one that focuses on exploring ideas, generating possibilities, looking for many right answers rather than just one which is creative thinking.

Explorers tend to have difficulty with organizing, and to be good at creative thinking. So let's spend a small part of our time working at getting somewhat organized, and a large part of our time practicing being very creative.

Some people are just creative – they don’t train themselves to think like they do and they often don’t even know that they are any different from the rest of us – it’s just who they are. However I believe that we can all enhance our ability to be creative over time. If you want to be more creative in everything you do, you need to know these three important concepts namely seeing things differently, Incubating and silencing the inner critic. Knowing these concepts will help you to come up with new ideas and solutions which in turn will gain more respect and admiration from your peers.

The first requirement to improve your creativity is to see what others are not seeing or at least to make an attempt to see things from a different perspective. Average people who face problems stop when they can't come up with a known fix from top of their heads but creative people go beyond that and force their brains to think about alternate ways.

This constant practice of forcing their brains helps them to make new connections with often unrelated subjects. It also helps them to come up with what others often call 'brilliant' ideas.

Most of these creative people knowingly or unknowingly follow a technique called 'incubation'. After they have sufficiently tried to exercise their brains to come up with solutions they forget about it and do something else.

An outside observer may think they just gave up since they couldn't think of any better ideas. But a person who knows how the brain works will tell you that they did not give up but simply handed over the problem to their loyal servant - the sub-conscious mind. The sub-conscious mind works vigorously at the back of their minds when their conscious mind is involved in something else.

Once the sub-conscious mind has worked out a solution. It then passes the ideas to the conscious mind and that's when these people have those 'light bulb' moments. Another important requirement to improve your creativity, is to silence the inner critic. This guy sits in your brain so to speak and is ready to jump at the first chance to tell you "why something won't work" or "how no one has tried that before".

Before you rule out any idea as impossible take some time to find ways to make it possible. Often times we do the exact opposite we rule out an idea and think about reasons to justify our decisions. If we only concentrate more rather than act mechanically we can solve a lot of problems and come up with good ideas. So, the next time when you want to think creatively ask these 3 questions: 1. Am I seeing things from a different angle? 2. Am I incubating for ideas? and finally 3. Have I asked the inner critic to be quiet for sometime?.

By following this simple procedure you can come up with some good ideas in future.

If You Think You Can, You Can

Some people think, well maybe the problem can be solved by some expert, but not by me because I'm not (a) smart enough, (b) an engineer, or (c) a blank (whether educated, expert, etc.) Again, though, look at the history of problem solving.

Who were the Wright brothers that they could invent an airplane? Aviation engineers? No, they were bicycle mechanics. The ball point pen was invented by a printer's proofreader, Ladislao Biro, not a mechanical engineer. Major advances in submarine design were made by English clergyman G. W. Garrett and by Irish schoolmaster John P. Holland. The cotton gin was invented by that well known attorney and tutor, Eli Whitney. The fire extinguisher was invented by a captain of militia, George Manby.

And so on. In fact, a major point made by recent writers about corporate excellence is that innovations in industry almost always come from individuals (not research groups) outside of the area of the invention. General Motors invented Freon, the refrigeration chemical, and tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive. Kodachrome was invented by two musicians. The continuous steel casting process was invented by a watchmaker (fooling around with brass casting). Soap making chemists turned down the problem of inventing synthetic detergents: those detergents were invented by dye making chemists.

In a nutshell, a good mind with a positive attitude and some good problem solving skills will go far in solving any problem. Interest in and commitment to the problem are the keys. Motivation--a willingness to expend the effort--is more important than laboratory apparatus. And remember that you can always do something. Even if you cannot totally eradicate the problem from the face of the earth, you can always do something to make the situation better.