Brainstorm
I often feel that I start projects without thinking about it enough. On the other hand, I have gone into projects with no brainstorming and found myself feeling no doubt that I put in enough thought beforehand. With this exercise, I wanted to explore different kinds of verbal thinking, and I wanted to see to what tasks they were best suited. This would give me more confidence in the amount of thinking I do before I start a project.
When I proposed this project, I said I was going to brainstorm about nothing in particular. This struck some people as a strange idea in that I would be brainstorming without a goal. Without any direction, wouldn’t it be unsatisfying? However, I wanted explore brainstorming itself, and I felt if I was going to try and produce a something specific (an idea for an invention, for example) it might end up confining my thought process. That is, the tasks that would be asked of me in working towards a specific goal might prevent me from trying inappropriate brainstorming techniques.
Thus I told myself I would work each day with the goal of creating three pages of thoughts per day. This proved too much on many days, but I tried to make sure I wrote something every day, even if it was only a paragraph. I find that holding yourself to strictly to a lofty goal means it’s a lot harder to sit down and start working. Thus if I only worked for 5 minutes it was a small victory because I sat down and did it.
I found the forms suited for different tasks. Hierarchical lists were very good for exploring my thoughts surrounding a subject. For example, here’s turkey:
After I did turkey, I did a list about death, and then I combined them. I found the process of combining the two subjects easy after I had done some thinking about them both. I think this would be a great technique for design. Say you had to design an item for children in hospitals, you could riff on children and then on hospitals, and then combine them.The other application I found was sketching stories and characters. I started one list about a writer character and it quickly evolved into a plot. I could associate within a story structure very effectively and efficiently with the hierarchical technique.
The linear-free association list does not have an obvious application for me. However, I found it the most fun and easiest to start form of brainstorming. It was always amusing to see what would come out of my head. The lists are also amusing for me to read. I’m not sure what I accomplished by making them, but after I would finish writing one I would feel satisfied—like I had created something. This is in contrast to the hierarchical lists, where sometimes I felt I was just dumping my beliefs onto paper, and not actually being creative.
The third form I employed was prose. I found this also found this satisfying to use. The act of synthesis that is inherent in putting paragraphs together was a welcome change from the lists. I felt I was exercising a different muscle group. It was satisfying because I was making sense of the world around me. While the lists recorded the what was in my brain, the prose made sense of that material. On rereading my work, however, I found the prose the least interesting. The most interesting parts were in the sometimes-absurd associative leaps I made in the lists.
Come to think of it, I found that there was no correlation between how much I was enjoying creating the work and how pleasurable it was to read later. For example:
I felt completely stupid making this list. While writing, I thought that the results was extremely irrelevant, lacking in insight, and tedious. However, on rereading it, I find it interesting, perhaps because many of the ideas I came up with were stretches and leaned towards the absurd.
At many times during the exercise I became aware that I would be showing this to an audience. This was distracting. After one week I decided to write down whatever I felt like and edit/censor the work before it went online. This turned out to be a good solution because while I could write down anything I wanted, I could also make my censoring creative. For example:
For one list, I decided to think about one of my projects. It is an electronic device, and I want to start building the second prototype, yet I thought I had not done enough thinking about how I should proceed. After creating a list, however, I came to realize that I had thought about the project thoroughly. By making this exhaustive list, I realized that to move forward in my project I must move into another creative technique: drawing sketches or learning by trial and error, for example.
I think it would be great for me to do a similar exercise with visual thinking.
This is one area that I do not understand very well. Also, I think a lot of
my pending projects could benefit from some exploration in this area.
As for verbal thinking, I will just have to start applying it more. I’m
a fan of Getting Things Done, by David Allen, and he suggests a weekly review
of what needs to be done in one’s life. It would be useful to me if
I started doing some exercises like I did this week for some of the projects
I have pending. If did it every week that would be even better.