When I have arranged a bouquet for the purpose of painting it, I always turn to the side I did not plan.
—Pierre Auguste Renoir
When the impressionist painter Renoir made this statement, he suggested the importance of developing creative perspectives. It could be argued that there can be no creative product without a creative perspective. To produce something new, we must see something new. What we see may be some previously overlooked element of a problem or a solution from combining two previously unjoined problem elements or ideas.
Two Insightful Thinkers
Perhaps the most well-known historical example of a sudden insight involves Archimedes, who jumped out of his bathtub and ran naked through the streets, shouting, “Eureka! Eureka!” This rather odd behavior followed his discovery of the principle of displacement. While taking a bath, he noticed how his body weight displaced an equal amount of water. This led him to an insight, or new perspective on how to determine whether a crown was solid gold.
Amore contemporary example is Art Fry, inventor of Post-it® Notes. He combined his need for a piece of paper that would stay put when he marked his church hymns with a scrap of paper that used a “failed” glue developed by Spencer Silver, one of his colleagues
at 3M. Both Archimedes and Art Fry produced a more creative perspective when they combined two previously unconnected problem elements.
Taken From : Pfeiffer 101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving
September 4th, 2009 at 4:26 am
[...] The right amount of memory varies according to the type of work you do and the type of software applications you’re using. Today’s word processing and spreadsheet work requires as little as 12 megabytes. However, systems equipped with 32 megabytes have become the lowend assumption by software and operating system developers. Systems used for graphic arts, publishing, and multimedia call for at least 64 megabytes of memory and it’s common for such systems to have 128 megabytes or more. [...]