Divergent thinking- thinking outside the box.
The question ‘how many uses does a paper clip have?’ was asked to a group of young children as part of a psychological study, the same question was asked to the same group of children five years later, and again five years after that, the results showed that as the children got older, the amount of uses decreased. An example of a younger, less logical answer was ‘you could land a spaceship on it’ whilst an older more practical answer was ‘clip papers together’.
The point of this information was to allow us to sometimes think outside of the box, and not let logic, practicality and limitations stop us from producing far-fetched, innovative ideas.
As part of the exercise focusing on divergent thinking we were shown an image of a brick and asked ‘what could you do with it?’, before this particular lecture, i would have answered ‘you could build with it’, yet with thinking outside of the box whats to stop us from living in it? from the image we could not tell what size it was or what it was made from. I’ve learnt that in order to perhaps be a successful designer i should push boundaries and question limitations!
Jessica Thornton 