#1 - And we're off..

The course "Exploring Creativity" started today at Oslo School of Architecture and Design. I'm taking this course in addition to the main "Interaction Design" course during my 7th semester of industrial design at AHO. Simon Clatworthy is responsible for the course.
This blog will be a collection of notes, thoughts and reflections intended for personal use, but feel free to have a read if you find anything of interest!
The course is every Tuesday so I'll probably post an update once a week.

Today Simon introduced us to the course and asked us what side of creativity we expected to explore during this course. I personally want to learn techniques to channel my creativity and focus on the task at hand. When working with a project I tend to loose focus in favor of whatever project intrigues me the most at that time as I have 3-5 school/work project going at any given time. And are there ways to switch your creativity on and off? Like when I'm going to bed at night for example...How can I stop my brain from exploring ideas when I really just need to recharge my batteries? I'm considering evening meditation....seriously....we're talking 2-3 hours every night when I'm excited about a project.

Simon introduced us to the widely known and used technique of "brain storming" today. Here are some notes:

• should have a facilitator when brainstorming in a group
• people tend to be less creative when brain storming in a group than "brain writing" individually
• some peoples opinions can override others
• people feed off of each others ideas - can be a good thing, but can also prevent individual ideas
  
• a good technique is for everyone to have a brain writing session individually before brain storming together - this way each individual can empty their brain before feeding off of each others ideas
• do it quickly - subconscious rather than filtering every thought through reflection
• brainstorming works best in groups of up to 10 people

In addition to the brain storming technique Simon pointed out something he considers to be of great importance - defining and understanding a problem. As an example he mentioned something like this:
Someone: "If you had an hour to save the world, what would you do?"
Einstein: "I would use 45 minutes to define the problem. Then I would use 15 minutes to solve it"
As well as a quote that went something like: "If you've defined the problem, you've already solved it"

So the point is to really understand and define a problem to come up with a good solution.
As an exercise we did a brain writing and then a collective brain storming on the problem "How can we improve the air quality in U1?" as there is no oxygen in U1 where we were sitting:)
We came up with a wide range of solutions from "installing a better air conditioning system" (one of the last suggestions to come up hehe) to "stop using the room all together". These are solutions both of which would solve our initially defined problem, but only because the problem is poorly defined. The latter would leave us hanging in the hallways..
So to come up with a satisfying solution we would have to define the problem more accurately. Something like: "How can we improve the quality of the air during classes as usual in U1 within the schools budget and without compromising other qualities of the room?"

We were given 2 articles today; "Handbook of Creativity" and from the American Psychologist of 2001 "What Is the Common Thread of Creativity".
I'll be back with some reflections on these shortly.