Suppose your objective is to improve a flashlight. For your modifier and noun you think of the combination “rising elephants.” Next you free-associate: leaping trunks, swiveling suitcases, twisting airplanes, flapping wings. You then use these combinations to suggest the following ideas:
• Atelescopic flashlight capable of holding a variable number of batteries (from “rising elephants”)
• Astorage compartment for small objects such as a spare bulb (from “leaping trunks”)
• Ahovercraft flashlight that floats above the ground or water (from “twisting airplanes”)
• Aflashlight with shutters for signaling (from “flapping wings”)
Parts Is Parts
Background
Sometimes creativity is a hit-or-miss proposition. Random stimuli may or may not spark ideas. Free associations are relatively unpredictable. You really don’t know how you’ll respond to a particular stimulus until you encounter it. Then, once you respond, you don’t know if the resulting ideas will be winners.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this. Unpredictability keeps things interesting and makes the occasional hot idea all the more exciting. There are times, however, when you might want to generate ideas a little more systematically. That’s where Parts Is Parts might help.
Parts Is Parts is based on the “Heuristic Ideation Technique (HIT)” developed by Edward Tauber (1972). It generates ideas by creating heuristics or rules of thumb. (A rule of thumb is a guideline that increases the chances of achieving a certain outcome.) Heuristics then are used to structure the idea generation process.
Taken From : Pfeiffer 101 Activities for Teaching Creativity
