Skip to main content

How to create ideas

https://medium.com/design-idea/b1d8984f603d

First:

An idea is always a combination of existing things.
Therefore: seeing relationships between things is the most important skill to practice creating ideas.

Step One: Absorb

This is the part that most people skip. Don’t.
There are two types of information you’ll need: specific and general.
Specific information comes from studying your subject closely. You need to eat all the information that exists about your subject. Go to it/her/them/there and experience it deeply. Pay very close attention, and don’t let up.
General information comes from knowledge about life, and current events/science. You must continue to grow your resources in this category your entire life. But for the purpose of this exercise, balance your specific information gathering with reading the news, going to museums, or learning anything new or unrelated to your topic.

Step Two: Mix the pot

Jam the information you’ve gathered into combinations you never thought possible. Mind map. Make associative lists. Give your mind a work-out. Don’t try to think of answers, just more questions.
Mind map of Time Management via Dianna Podmoroff
This is where relationship-sensing comes in handy. Practice playing with words and ideas.
Try to really ‘listen’ for the relationships between elements, instead of forcing one.
During this stage you’ll probably have tons of ‘fuzzy’ and half-baked ideas—write these all down! They’re additional building blocks for you to use and mull over.
Once you’ve simply exhausted all of your data…

Step Three: Leave it to the Subconscious

Take a nap. Seriously. Or just go to bed. Drop it.
“…The creations involve a period of conscious work, followed by a period of unconscious work…”
Henri Poincare
Put the project out of your mind and do whatever it is that makes you feel great. Hiking, music, running, anything that you enjoy. The point is to let your subconscious mind take the wheel for a little while.

Step Four: Eureka!

The next morning, while you’re frying eggs, you’re going to be struck with inspiration. Or maybe when you’re walking the dog. Or in the shower. Or on the bus. Or whatever it is that you do that’s routine and your mind begins to wander… BOOM!
“Just think about it deeply, then forget it…then an idea will jump up in your face.”
Don Draper, Madmen s.1 e.11
Relish in the glory of your own mind for a moment. Only a moment, though— because the hardest part is yet to come.

Step Five: Develop & Shape the Idea into Actual Usefulness

Most ideas need to be bent, stretched, or otherwise modified from their original form before they join us in the physical plane.
Put your idea out there and embrace feedback. Although it may be painful to watch your mind-child be critiqued and battered from the input of others (who clearly don’t share the same creative genius as you!), it will help develop it from ‘a good idea’ into something really worthwhile.

Summary:

  1. Learn as much as you can about the topic
  2. Spend time ‘chewing’ your thoughts and mixing them together
  3. Do something else and let your subconscious work
  4. The idea will appear out of thin air in your mind
  5. Share your idea and bring it into reality

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Difference Between LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Home Edition (#31313) and LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 (#45544)

http://robotsquare.com/2013/11/25/difference-between-ev3-home-edition-and-education-ev3/ This article covers the difference between the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Home Edition and LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 products. Other articles in the ‘difference between’ series: * The difference and compatibility between EV3 and NXT ( link ) * The difference between NXT Home Edition and NXT Education products ( link ) One robotics platform, two targets The LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 robotics platform has been developed for two different target audiences. We have home users (children and hobbyists) and educational users (students and teachers). LEGO has designed a base set for each group, as well as several add on sets. There isn’t a clear line between home users and educational users, though. It’s fine to use the Education set at home, and it’s fine to use the Home Edition set at school. This article aims to clarify the differences between the two product lines so you can decide which

Let’s ban PowerPoint in lectures – it makes students more stupid and professors more boring

https://theconversation.com/lets-ban-powerpoint-in-lectures-it-makes-students-more-stupid-and-professors-more-boring-36183 Reading bullet points off a screen doesn't teach anyone anything. Author Bent Meier Sørensen Professor in Philosophy and Business at Copenhagen Business School Disclosure Statement Bent Meier Sørensen does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations. The Conversation is funded by CSIRO, Melbourne, Monash, RMIT, UTS, UWA, ACU, ANU, ASB, Baker IDI, Canberra, CDU, Curtin, Deakin, ECU, Flinders, Griffith, the Harry Perkins Institute, JCU, La Trobe, Massey, Murdoch, Newcastle, UQ, QUT, SAHMRI, Swinburne, Sydney, UNDA, UNE, UniSA, UNSW, USC, USQ, UTAS, UWS, VU and Wollongong.

Logic Analyzer with STM32 Boards

https://sysprogs.com/w/how-we-turned-8-popular-stm32-boards-into-powerful-logic-analyzers/ How We Turned 8 Popular STM32 Boards into Powerful Logic Analyzers March 23, 2017 Ivan Shcherbakov The idea of making a “soft logic analyzer” that will run on top of popular prototyping boards has been crossing my mind since we first got acquainted with the STM32 Discovery and Nucleo boards. The STM32 GPIO is blazingly fast and the built-in DMA controller looks powerful enough to handle high bandwidths. So having that in mind, we spent several months perfecting both software and firmware side and here is what we got in the end. Capturing the signals The main challenge when using a microcontroller like STM32 as a core of a logic analyzer is dealing with sampling irregularities. Unlike FPGA-based analyzers, the microcontroller has to share the same resources to load instructions from memory, read/write the program state and capture the external inputs from the G