In this lesson we’ll focus on divergent thinking those unexpected ideas, that can kick you into looking at a problem, even a familiar one, in a new way.  Often these lead to solutions that you overlooked previously or are simply in such a different place you had never even considered them.  We will look at a range of techniques to help you break free of entrenched thinking, and in particular bad ideas, which is partly about encouraging you think again a little like that three year old version of yourself.  However, even the exercises on bad ideas include more structured prompts that start to take you down the convergent paths we’ll revisit in later lessons.

2.1  Bad Ideas

Have you ever been in one of those brainstorming meetings – you know the ones where you try to think of new ideas, and say that you are all going to uncritical … and yet still you seem to either just make tiny changes from what you already know or are stuck trying to think of that new wonderful good idea, but nothing comes.

What of instead of trying to think of a good idea you deliberately set out to make a bad idea or a silly one?

In this section you will learn to ask simple questions about bad ideas, and see how this can lead to new insights and even ultimately lead to new good ideas!

2.2  Bad Ideas – examples

How can one possibly learn anything useful from a chocolate teapot, an inflatable dartboard or a glass hammer?  This section develops a number of examples of bad ideas, following the steps in the previous section.  However, are there some ideas so bad that no amount of prompting, questioning or transformation can ever help?

Note: In the slide I use the term ‘oxymoron’ with a wide meaning.  The strict use of oxymoron is literally self-contradictory words such as ‘cold heat’, but the kinds of oxymoron suggested in this section (such as glass hammer) are closer to what Wikipedia refers to as ‘comic oxymoron‘, or Richard Lederer calls ‘opinion oxymoron‘

2.3  Why Bad Ideas?

Having worked through the bad ideas exercises, you might be wondering “why?”  Why is it a good idea to spend time thinking about bad ideas?  This section looks at three ways in which bad ideas can help transform your creative practice.

2.4  Divergence

Bad ideas are one way of helping you to think divergently ‘out of the box’.  However, they are not the only technique that can help you do this.  In this section we will look at a number of other techniques that can help, from random metaphors to the brilliant designer of awful things