ITAP 7

Developing Ideational Fluency / Overcoming Mindset

Being able to easily create and put on paper a great number of ideas is a great starting point for any project or job. Not necessarily all the ideas will be good, most will probably be mediocre at best, but having a quick mind gives you a lot of options to work from. This is not only something that comes naturally, but a skill that needs to be developed and constantly worked on. Good techniques to do this are brainstorming and mindmapping. Always having paper and pen is a good start, so that as soon as an idea comes to mind, or a brief is given, we can start jotting down ideas in any way the come to us. This way, nothing gets lost as it is all on paper, and even though most things might be irrelevant or too obvious, there will probably be a couple of good ideas that can be developed and can lead to a good outcome. Of course there are many ways to develop this skill, for example I always get a lot of ideas when doing research (and I end up doing a lot of it) or even just when talking to people.

Sometimes though only developing ideas from a mind extra conscious of the task at hand can get you stuck in a rut or make you hit the dreaded “brick wall”. Simply freeing your mind from whatever you are overthinking or changing the environment you’re working in are always very good tricks to start seeing things a different way. The Surrealists had developed quite a few different techniques to be able to constantly create unique and original things. They loved games to make the mind more irrational and able to develop ideas in a more free and creative manner. Other than the more obvious collage and cut-up techniques, one I’ve always found interesting is what they called “cadavre exquis” (literally, ‘exquisite corpse’) which consists in having a group of people, each with a piece of paper, collectively assembling a set of words or images. Each participant would write or draw in turn on a piece of paper, then folding it to hide all or part of the writing/drawing, then passing it on to the person next to them. The end composition is a set of completely random and different words or images, that can be the starting point for a final piece.