Methods to Stimulate Creativity

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"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." --John Steinbeck Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples of how the world's most creative practitioners in art, music, film, science, literature and other fields have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. Dr. Barrett offers insights showing us how to encourage lucid, meaningful dreaming, and how to apply the meanings of our dreams to solving problems--from the everyday to the extraordinary. This is the stuff dreams are made of. In the visual arts, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built the startling new genre of surrealism out of dreams. Kubla Kahn dreamed the design for his stately pleasure dome; thousands of years later, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, continues the tradition of dreaming designs into life in her extraordinary buildings. Film is a fertile avenue for dreams: "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman, as have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, physiologist Otto Loewi dreamed the medical experiment that earned him the Nobel Prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi translated his dream of resistance into a movement that changed the world. Since Freud, we take it for granted that our dreams reflect our past. In The Committee of Sleep, Barrett reveals how dreams can also tell us about our future potential--and how to reach it.

[Punitive] perspectives on artistic education and aesthetic knowing in classrooms void of creative expression. And how to get it back.
(A critique and response to the question:
What impact would art education have on creative cognition in both students’ ability to problem solve and on teachers’ ability to teach with passion as co-learners?)

This is the first chapter in the book: Challenging Ageing.

Our biological response to external challenges frequently obeys hormetic principles. During the phenomenon of hormesis, mild stressful challenges may up-regulate defence and repair pathways, with a subsequent overall improvement in function. It is important to highlight that hormesis is a dose-response, non-linear phenomenon, meaning that a low dose of a stressor can result in benefit whereas a higher dose may result in damage. Hormesis is invoked when the challenge is of sufficient magnitude and appropriate quality as to satisfy the definition of ‘novelty’.  Routine and monotony do not, as a rule, invoke a hormetic response. In this chapter I will discuss certain characteristics of hormesis as applied to humans, and examine several situations whereby an adequately-timed stimulus may be of practical health benefit. The assessment and response to the new challenge leads to adaptation and thus, eventually, improvement of function within a particular environment (the environment where the challenges have originated from). In this way, there is a direct link between external challenging information and internal physical or biological changes. This link will be explored in detail, both in this chapter and in other chapters of this book.

In questo lavoro viene evidenziato in prima istanza il ruolo della creatività nelle aziende moderne e nella risoluzione dei problemi (Problem Solving), in seconda battuta vengono descritti i principali strumenti di stimolazione della creatività suddividendoli in tecniche e metodi a seconda del loro livello di struttura.

The paper discusses creative thinking as a methodological tool for research and design in the urban disciplines. The aim is to designate a methodology process based on the development of creative thinking. For this reason, two theories related to the creative process were initially analyzed and then the main characteristics of creativity are described. Based on this analysis, I propose a system of methods and principles that can enhance creative thinking and establish an integrated methodological research and design approach. The main conclusion is that an appropriate methodology can be structured only if the characteristics of creativity are defined and translated into corresponding techniques that stimulate our creative potential.

"This article describes how we can use art to express feelings in a difficult situation and help encourage creativity, even jumpstart creativity of an author having writer's block. If you are thinking of trying some painting, be sure and read the tips for beginners at the end of the article. This article first appeared on TheWriteRoomBlog on December 4, 2013 at: http://www.thewriteroomblog.com/?p=15..

This paper describes a case study involving individuals from two distinct kinds of end-user stakeholders of a tourism Web site whose results support a conclusion that the EPMcreate creativity enhancement technique is effective when used by individuals, as opposed to groups, and when used by end-user stakeholders, as opposed to requirements analysts.

Creativity is often needed in requirements elicitation, i.e., requirement idea generation; and techniques to enhance creativity are believed to be useful. This paper describes two controlled experiments to compare the requirements-elicitation effectiveness of three creativity enhancement techniques (CET): (1) full EPMcreate; (2) Power-Only EPMcreate, an optimization of full EPMcreate; and (3) traditional brainstorming. In each experiment, one team of university students applied one of the two or three CETs under study in the experiment to generate ideas for requirements for enhancing a high school’s public Web site. The results of the first experiment indicate that Power-Only EPMcreate is more effective, by the quantity and quality of the ideas generated, than the full EPMcreate, which is, in turn, more effective than brainstorming. The results of the second experiment confirm that Power-Only EPMcreate is more effective, by the same measures, than full EPMcreate. In each experiment, for the sake of uniform, reproducible evaluation, a requirement idea is considered high quality if it is both new and useful.

[Context]
Creativity is often needed in requirements elicitation, ie, generating ideas for requirements, and therefore, techniques to enhance creativity are believed to be useful.
[Objective]
How does the size of a group using the EPMcreate creativity enhancement technique or an optimization of it, POEPM-create, affect the group’s and each member of the group’s effectiveness in generating requirement ideas?
[Method]
This paper describes an experiment in which individuals and two-person and four-person groups used POEPMcreate to generate ideas for requirements for enhancing a high school’s public Web site.
[Results]
The data of this experiment combined with the data of two previous experiments involving two-person and four-person groups using EPMcreate and POEPMcreate indicate that the size of a group using EPMcreate or POEPMcreate does affect the number of raw and new requirement ideas generated by the group and by the average member of the group.
[Conclusions]
A conclusion from the data is that generally, the larger a group is, up to a particular group size that depends on the creativity enhancement technique used, the more raw and new requirement ideas it generates. After that particular group size, the larger a group is, the fewer raw and new requirement ideas it generates. Another conclusion from the data is that generally, the larger a group is, up to a particular group size that depends on the creativity enhancement technique used, the more raw and new requirement ideas the average group member generates. After that particular group size, the larger a group is, the fewer raw and new requirement ideas he or she …

This paper describes a case study involving individuals from two distinct kinds of end-user stakeholders of a tourism Web site whose results support a conclusion that the EPMcreate creativity enhancement technique is effective when used by individuals, as opposed to groups, and when used by end-user stakeholders, as opposed to requirements analysts.

The objectives of this research are: 1) to develop and determine the quality of a blended learning management model using synectics teaching and out-of-the-box thinking techniques; 2) to compare creativity thinking score after receiving the blended learning management by teaching synectics and outof-the-box thinking techniques to foster creativity and 3) to study the satisfaction of students learning with the blended learning management model. The sample group used in this research was the 1 st year Bachelor of Education students, Faculty of Education, Rajabhat Nakhon Si Thammarat University including 60 students enrolled in the course of innovation and information technology for communication and learning in semester 2, academic year 2020. They were divided into experimental groups and control groups. The research tools included web-based lessons, lesson plans and satisfaction assessments including mean, S.D. and hypothesis testing with independent t-test. The results showed that:1) the results of the development and quality assessment of the blended learning model by using synectic teaching and out-of-the-box thinking techniques to promote creativity were at a very good level; 2) comparison of creativity scores of the experimental group students after receiving the learning management with the developed instructional model were higher than the control group, indicating that the mean scores have statistically significantly different at. 05 and 3) the overall student satisfaction assessment in all aspects was high level. It was concluded that the research results were in accordance with the hypothesis testing.

You are trying to develop your next innovative software system. Finding innovative requirement ideas for your innovative software system requires creativity. How do you encourage your analysts to be more creative, to think more out of the box for the innovative software system? Brainstorming for requirement ideas is a popular and effective method for encouraging analysts to be more creative in generating innovative requirement ideas for your software system. Perhaps you have felt that there are better ways to encouraging creativity in generating innovative requirement ideas. You are right! We have demonstrated in a number of experiments that EPMcreate is more effective than brainstorming to generate requirement ideas. EPMcreate works better than brainstorming because EPMcreate gets the analysts to systematically explore the space of requirement ideas while brainstorming leaves analysts wandering aimlessly in the same space. EPMcreate leads its users to focus on all combinations of t...

Abstract. [Context] Creativity is often needed in requirements elicitation, i.e., generating ideas for requirements, and techniques to enhance creativity are believed to be useful. [Objective] How does the size of a group using POEPMcreate, an optimization of EPMcreate, affect the group’s and each member of the group’s effectiveness in generating requirement ideas? [Method] This paper describes an experiment in which groups of sizes one and two used POEPMcreate to generate ideas for requirements for enhancing a high school’s public Web site.
[Results] The data of this experiment combined with the data of two previous experiments involving groups of sizes two and four indicate that the size of a group using POEPMcreate does affect the number of raw and new requirement ideas generated by the group and by each member of the group. [Conclusion] The conclusion from the data is that the larger a group is the more raw and new requirement ideas it generates. However, there is some support for the conclusion that a group member generates more raw and new requirement ideas in a smaller group than in a larger group. This conclusion is supported by qualitative data gathered from a survey of professional business or requirements analysts.