This course deals directly with your ability for creativity which is a critical skill in any field. It focuses on divergent thinking, the ability to develop multiple ideas and concepts to solve problems. Through a series of creativity building exercises, short lectures, and readings, learners develop both an understanding of creativity and increase their own ability. This course will help you understand the role of creativity and innovation in your own work and in other disciplines. It will challenge you to move outside of your existing comfort zone and to recognize the value of that exploration. This course will help you understand the importance of diverse ideas, and to convey that understanding to others. The principal learning activity in the course is a series of "differents" where you are challenged to identify and change your own cultural, habitual, and normal patterns of behavior. Beginning with a prompt, e.g. "eat something different", you will begin to recognize your own = limits and to overcome them. In addition, you are encouraged to understand that creativity is based on societal norms, and that by it's nature, it will differ from and be discouraged by society. In this course, the persistence of the creative person is developed through practice. At the same time, these exercises are constrained by concerns of safety, legality, and economics, which are addressed in their creative process.
Steven JohnsonTED talk: Where Good Ideas Come From
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Divergent and Convergent Thinking
In this unit we'll look as some of the ways we can describe creativity and examine the concepts of divergent and convergent thinking. We'll look at generating more ideas, how to critique and make improvements, and continue to practice our development of ideas. Practice and exploration continue as these are the means we will continue to improve our own creativity.
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Brad Hokanson, PhDProfessor
College of Design
Jody Nyboer, PhDInstructor
School of Design
[MUSIC]
[APPLAUSE] >> Just a few minutes ago I
took this picture about ten blocks from here.
This is the Grand Cafe here in Oxford.
I took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffee house to
open in England in 1650, that's its great claim to fame.
And I wanted to show it to you not because I want to give you
the kind of Starbucks tour of historic England.
But rather because the English Coffee House was crucial to the development and
spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years,
what we now call the enlightenment.
And the coffee house played such a big role in the Brittany enlightenment and
part of what people was drinking there right.
Because before the spread of coffee and
tea through British culture, what people drank both elite and
mass folks drank day in and day out, from dawn until dusk was alcohol.
Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice.
You would drink a little beer with breakfast, and
have a little wine at lunch, a little gin particularly around 1650.
And top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day that was the healthy
choice, because the water wasn't safe to drink.
And so effectively, until the rise of the coffeehouse you had an entire population
that was effectively drunk all day.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
you can imagine what that would be like right, in your own life.
And I know this is true for some of you, if you were drinking all day.
>> [LAUGH] >> And then you switched from a depressant
to a stimulant in your life you would have better ideas.
>> [LAUGH] >> You would be sharper and more alert.
And so it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened
as England switched to tea and coffee.
But the other thing that makes the coffee house important is
the architecture of the space.
It was a space where people would get together from different backgrounds,
different fields of expertise and share.
It was a space as Matt really talked about, where ideas could have sex.
This was their congenial bed in a sense.
Ideas would get together there, and an astonishing number of innovations from
this period have a coffee house somewhere in their story.
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffee houses for
the last five years, because I've kind of been on this quest
to investigate this question of where good ideas come from?
What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation,
unusual levels of creativity?
What's the kind of environmental, what is the space of creativity?
And what I've done is I've looked at both environments like the coffee house,
I've looked at media environments like the world wide web that have been
extraordinarily innovative.
I've gone back to the history of the first cities,
I've even gone to biological environments like corral reefs and
rain forests that involve unusual levels of biological innovation.
And what I've been looking for is shared patterns kind of signature behavior that
shows up again and again in all of these environments.
Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from, that we can take and
kind of apply to our own lives or our own organizations,
our own environments to make them more creative and innovative?
And I think I found a few.
But what you have to do to make sense of this and
to really understand that these principles is you have to do away with a lot of
the way in which our kind of conventional metaphors and
language steers us towards certain concepts of idea creation.
We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration right we
have the kind of the flash of insight, the stroke of insight,
we have epiphanies, we have eureka moments, we have the lightbulb moments.
All of these concepts, as kind of rhetorically florid as they are,
share this basic assumption which is that an idea is a single thing.
It's something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment.
But in fact, what would I would argue and what your really need to kind of
begin with is this idea that in idea is a network on the most elemental level.
This is what is happening inside your brain.
An idea, a new idea is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other
inside your brain.
It's a new configuration that has never formed before.
And the question is how do you get your brain into environments where these new
networks are going to be more likely to form?
And it turns out that in fact, the kind of network patterns of the outside
world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain.
So the metaphor I'd like to use is actually, I can take from a story of
a great idea that's quite recent, a lot more recent than the 1650s.
A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero has a company, an organization,
called Design that Matters.
They decided to tackle this really pressing problem, of the terrible problems
we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world.
One of the things that's very frustrating about this is that we
know by getting modern neonatal incubators into any contacts,
if we can keep premature babies warm basically it's very simple.
We can have infant mortality rate and those environment.
So the technology is there,
we have this view of standard in all the industrialized world.
The problem is if you buy a $40,000 incubator, and
you send it off to a mid sized village in Africa.
It will work great for a year or two years and then something will break,
and it will remain broken forever.
Because you don't have a whole system of spare parts and
you don't have the on the ground expertise to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment.
And so you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting
aid, and all these advanced electronics to these countries and
then it ends up being useless.
So what Prestro and his team decided to do is to look around and say,
what are the kind of abundant resources in these developing world contexts?
What they noticed was they don't have a lot of DVRs,
they don't have a lot of microwaves.
But they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road.
There's a Toyota 4Runner on the street in all these places.
They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working.
So they started to think,
could we build a neonatal incubator that's built entirely out of automobile parts?
And this is what they ended up coming with,
it's called the NeoNurture device from the outside it looks like a normal thing you
find in a modern Western hospital.
In the inside it's all car parts, it's got a fan, it's got headlights for warm,
it's got door chime for alarm, it runs off a car battery.
And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and
the ability to fix a headlight and you can repair this thing.
Now that's a great idea, but what I would like to say is that in fact this is
a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen.
We like to think our breakthrough ideas are like that $40,000 brand new incubator,
state of the art technology.
But more often than not,
they're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby.
We take ideas from other people,
from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop,
and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new.
That's really where innovation happens, and that means that we have to change some
of our models of kind of what Innovation and deep thinking really looks like.
This is one vision of it, another is Newton and the apple.
This is a statue though Newton was in Cambridge, this is a statue from Oxford.
Where you're sitting there thinking a deep thought and
the apple falls from the tree and you have a theory of gravity.
In fact, the spaces that have historically lead to innovation tend to look like this.
This is Hogarth's famous painting of a political dinner at a tavern but
this is what the coffee shops look like back then.
This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together
where people are likely to have kind of new interesting, unpredictable collisions.
People from different backgrounds.
So if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative,
we have to build spaces that strangely enough look a little bit more like this.
This is what your office should look like, it's part of my message here.
And one of the problems with this is that people are actually,
when you research this field.
People are notoriously unreliable when they actually kind of self report on where
they have their own good ideas or their history of their best ideas.
And a few years ago,
a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically,
do the big brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from.
You went to a bunch of science labs around the world and
video taped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job.
So when they were sitting in front of the microscope,
when they were talking to their colleagues at the water cooler, and all these things.
And he recorded of all these conversations, and
tried to figure out where the most important ideas, where they happened.
And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab,
we have this image, they're poring over the microscope and
they see something in the tissue sample and eureka, they've got the idea.
What happened actually,
when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that in fact, almost all of the important
breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab in front of the microscope.
They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting when everybody got
together and shared their kind of latest data and findings.
Oftentimes when people share the mistakes they were having, the error, the noise,
and the signal they were discovering.
And something about that environment started calling the liquid network,
where you have lots of different ideas that are together.
Different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other,
bouncing off each other that environment is in fact,
environment that beats innovation.
The other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of
innovation down to kind of shorter time frames.
They want to tell the story of the eureka moment.
They want to say there I was, I was standing there and
I had it all suddenly clearing my head.
But in fact, if you go back and look at the store record in turns out that
a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods,
I call this the slow hunch.
Heard a lot recently about kind of hunch and instinct, and
kind of blink like sudden moments of clarity.
But in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on sometimes for
decades, in the back of people's minds.
They have a feeling there is an interesting problem but
they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them.
They spend all this time kind of working out certain problems, but
there's another thing lingering there that they're interesting in, but
they can't quite solve.
Darwin is a great example of this.
Darwin himself in his autobiography tells the story of coming up with the idea for
natural selection as a classic eureka moment.
He's in his study, it's October of 1838 and
he's reading Malthus actually, on population.
And all of the sudden the basic algorithm on natural selection actually pops into
his head and he says at last, I had a theory with which to work.
That's in his autobiography.
About a decade or two ago a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and
looked at Darwin's notebooks from this period.
And Darwin kept these copious notebooks,
where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch.
And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for
months, and months, and months,
before he had his alleged epiphany reading Malthus in October of 1838.
There are passages where you can read it and
you think like you are reading from a Darwin text book.
From the period before he has this epiphany, and so
what you realize is Darwin in a sense had the idea, he had the concept but
was unable of fully thinking it yet.
And that is actually how great ideas often happen,
they fade into view over long periods of time.
Now the challenge for all of us is, how do you create environments that allow
these ideas to have this kind of long half life?
It's hard to go to your boss and say, I have an excellent idea for
our organisation, it will be useful in 2020.
Could you just give me some time to do that?
Now a couple of companies like Google, they have innovation time off,
20% time where in a sense those are hunch cultivating mechanisms in an organization,
that's a key thing.
And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's
hunches, that's what often happens.
You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half and
if you're in the right environment,
they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts.
So in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property,
building barricades, having secretive R&D labs on patenting
everything that we have so that those ideas will remain valuable.
And people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas and
the culture will be more innovative.
But I think there's a case we've made that we should spent at least as much time if
not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and
not just protecting them.
And I'll leave you with this story which I think captures a lot of these values,
and it's just a wonderful kind of tale of innovation and
how it happens in unlikely ways.
It's October of 1957 in Sputnik has just launched and we're in Laurel,
Maryland at the Applied Physics Lab associated with Johns Hopkins University.
And it's Monday morning and
the news has just broken about this satellite that's now orbiting the planet.
And of course, this is nerd heaven.
There are all these physics geeks who are there thinking my gosh,
this is incredible.
I can't believe that this has happened.
And two of them to 20 something researchers at the APL are there at
the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their
colleagues.
And these two guys named Guyer and Wittenbach, and they start talking and
one of them says, hey has anybody tried to listen to this thing?
There's this man made satellite in outer space, it's obviously broadcasting
some kind of signal, we could probably hear it, if we tune in.
And so they ask around to a couple of their colleagues and everybody said no,
I hadn't thought of doing that, that's an interesting idea.
And it turns out Wittenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception, and
he's got a little antenna set up with an amplifier in his office.
And so Guyer and Wittenbach go back to Wittenbach's office and
they start kind of noodling around, hacking as we might call it now.
And after a couple of hours they actually start picking up this signal because
the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track.
It was right at 20 megahertz, so that you could pick it up really easily
because they were afraid people would think it was a hoax basically.
So they made it really easy to find it.
And so these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal and
people start kind of coming into the office and saying wow, that's pretty cool.
Can I hear it?
Well, that's great.
And before long they think well jeez, this is kind of historic.
We may be the first people in the United States to be listening to this.
We should record it and so they bring in this big clunky analog tape recorder.
And they start recording these little bleep, bleeps.
And they start writing down the kind of date stamp, time stamps for
each little bleep that they record.
And then they start thinking well gosh,
we're noticing small little frequency variations here.
We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling,
if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler effect.
And then they played around it a little bit more.
And they talked to a couple of their colleagues who have other kind of
specialties and they said jeez, I think we could actually look at the slope of
the Doppler effect to figure out the points of which
the satellite is closest to our antenna and the points of which is furthest away.
That's pretty cool.
And eventually they get permission.
This is all a little side project that hadn't been officially part of their job
description.
They get permission to use the new UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room that
they'd just gotten at the APL.
And they run some more of the numbers, at the end of about three or four weeks,
turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around
the Earth, just from listening to this one little signal.
Going off in this little side hunch that have inspired to do
over lunch one morning.
A couple weeks later, their boss Frank McCarr pulls them into the room and says
hey, you guys, I have to ask you something about that project you're working on.
You figured out an unknown location
of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground.
Could you go the other way?
Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground,
if you knew the location of the satellite?
And they thought about it and they said, well I guess maybe you could.
Let's run the numbers here and so they went back, and they thought about it and
they came back and said, actually it'll be easier.
And he said,
that's great because see I have these new nuclear submarines that I'm building.
And it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile, so
that it will land right on top of Moscow if you don't know where the submarine is
the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
So we were thinking, we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it
to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean.
Could you work on that problem?
And that's how GPS was born.
30 years later, Ronald Reagan actually opened it up,
made it an open platform that anybody could kind of build upon.
Anybody could come along and build new technology.
That would create and innovate on top of this open platform.
Left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it.
And now I guarantee you, certainly half this room,
if not more has a device sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of
these satellites in outer space.
And I bet you, one of you if not more has used said device and
said satellite system to locate a near by coffee house somewhere in the last-
>> [LAUGH]
>> Day or the last week, right?
>> [APPLAUSE] >> And
that I think is a great case study, great lesson in a power.
The marvelous kind of unplanned emerging unpredictable power of open innovative
systems, when you build them right, they will be led to completely new
directions that the creator never even dreamed off.
Here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this
hunch and this little passion that had developed.
Then they thought they were fighting the cold war and then it turns out,
they're just helping somebody find a soy latte.
>> [LAUGH] >> [APPLAUSE]
>> That is how innovation happens chance
favors the connected mind.
Thank you very much.
>> [APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC]
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