Make the familiar unfamiliar again
This is one of the great nuggets of advice in Raph Koster’s 2014 GDC Next conference presentation. Whether you are a game designer or not the beginning and end of the talk are applicable across fields of interest. Among his other comments I scribbled as I watched were his description of creativity being what happens when you try to make oil and water mix. “It isn’t this grand mystical thing. It is actually a fairly straight forward process that you can cause to happen quite intentionally and it is a skill set that you can actually practice and develop into a habit.”
He spends some time on constraints, which is one of my favorite creative idea generators. What if you had to write a poem where each line used every letter of the alphabet? Well check out one way to do that in the tale of The Pangrammatic Fox.
He reminds us that creativity is about taking something out of its comfy place and putting it somewhere else. Ideas arise when you change the context of an idea and ideas change as they move from one context to another. Try taking a tool out of its usual context, try to get past your assumptions about it. He uses the game tools of dice and cards. What can they be used for besides the obvious. Cards can be building tools in a house of cards. Cards can be tossed. Cards can be used as covers for things on a desk. Cards can be ... you fill in the blank. Oh, and regarding the dice, I’ve just added Blueprints, a board game that uses dice and building blocks to my list of games I want to try.
Some people may disagree with the noise solution but personally I like it. Interesting to see that there is some science behind it. He points out Coffitivity that generates coffee shop background sounds for you and if you check out their website you’ll find this link to the research that backs up the claim that some noise improves creative cognition.
So whatever the tools are of your field of interest, how can you take one that is familiar and make it unfamiliar? What ideas does doing this generate? How can you challenge yourself to create using a limited toolbox? And how are you making practicing creativity a habit?
