Art & Design / Psych / Pers. Dev. - Short - Gaming
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DREAM ON:
Increase Creative Input by Leveraging Divergent Thinking
Imagine yourself in a room, noone or nothing else to keep you company but a plain ol' paperclip. Your task: Coming up with as many, however outlandish, ways of making practical use of it, as long as there's even a far-fetched possibility that it might work. Feeling inspired? Unfortunately, you don't have much of a choice as the countdown is drawing ever closer:
Ready. Set. Go!
This, in a nutshell, is how psychological reaearchers study the human capacity for creativity, or, as academics themselves refer to to it: DIVERGENT THINKING.
Although the concept neither can, nor should, be expected to carry the term solely on its own shoulders, it is - undubitably, in fact - a key prerequisite for its occurrence.
After all, it is hard to come up with creative ideas that are practically useful (usefulness comprising a central criterium) if there is not, at bare minimum, the generation of presently unorthodox, and previously inconceivable or untested, solutions.
What's even more interesting, though, is that contrary to the widely accepted truism that one should 'wait for the perfect idea' when the proverbial well of inspiration dries up, empirical testing of DIVERGENT THINKING shows the exact opposite:
When out of ideas, or - worse yet - simply internalizing doubts about one's own ability for creative output, the best way of restoring personal confidence and idea generation is simply to press on, lethargy and pessimism notwithstanding.
How do we know?
Because no matter whether a test subject is asked to come up with 10 practical uses for a paperclip or 100 - stringing them together to make a rope or bungling a thousand of them together into a low-quality, but hypothetical soccer ball, just to give a few, off-the-cuff examples - the proportion of the ideas generated that may hold practical utility remain exactly the same.
That is, if 3 of the first 10 ideas conceived are deemed useful to yourself or others, an average of 30 of 100 ideas will be, assuming that you - the visionary - keep your chin up and refuse to throw in the towel at least a little bit longer.
In conceiving and actually designing the logo and main character for the video game 'Northwald' - featured above - I, like many others before me, spun my artistic wheels in the mud for literal hours trying to come up with the right character design, typography, and color theme. Then: A breakthrough.
On the cusp of giving up, I began drawing the first thing that came into my mind: and cute, anthropomorphic plushy whose towering title just so happens to draw inspiration for Norse mythology.
Was it the expected solution for my long-lingering canondrum? No.
Did it materialize as quickly as you expect your run-of-the-mill Illustrator design to materialize? Once again, no.
But dang, was it worth it once things clicked and something, somehow, possessed me to bring about its incarnation.
"Out of creative ideas," you say?
It's certainly possible, assuming that your supposed lack of creativity stems from the complete emaciation thay results from many hours of physical or mental overexertion.
You know, the kind of situation where you're so fatigued that you wouldn't make a sandwich or pick up the phone even if your life depended on it.
But in your average scenario?
Something serious is amiss, and it sure ain't the almost invariable, ever-present human capacity for generating novel and useful ideas - you know, the psychological linchpin that constitutes the be-all, end-all of creative output taking place.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, why don'tcha.