Think like a Bushman...An exercise to look at everyday objects differently...

An African Bushman, unaware of white culture, discovers an empty Coca Cola bottle in the Kalahari Desert. The bushman closely examines this mystical object (casually dropped by a passing pilot), wondering what it is good for. He then tries blowing into it, and is very pleased to learn that it makes a noise. In this creativity exercise you encourage your students to become Bushmen. Yes, bushmen...

You need to collect 5 to 10 props. You display a prop to your students and ask them to find a new use for it. This exercise encourages creativity since it forces the thinking process to erase or ignore what is known and come up with fresh ways of looking at something familiar.

Think about these, "Ways to..." and leave your ideas as comments...

These could be a good set of ice breakers, or longer tasks:

Ways to...
Brainstorming Exercise

Ways to get people painting and drawing
Ways to discover new bands
Marketing a new fragrance
Ways to discourage use of cars
Ways to find a new partner
Ways to encouraging people to keep exercising

I liked this exercise...I've called it Movie Maker..

This exercise is courtesey of John Cliff. www.johncliff.com

"You can add to your repertoire of creative tools. It will help you increase your output of ideas whenever you’re doing any sort of brainstorming, or even just kicking a few thoughts around with colleagues.

Make a huge movie screen in your mind and start creating vivid mental imagery of things that have anything at all to do with the topic under discussion.

Let’s say you’re kicking around a few ideas to do with product improvement. Create a mental movie of a suitable situation you’re familiar with.

You might, for example, put yourself in your local supermarket where you’re walking around looking at all those products on the shelves, the point-of-sale material, the overhead posters and displays.

And, specifically, look at close-ups of the products and packaging.

Now, look at the wealth of ideas you can see as you mentally stroll around the aisles - create a six-pack, sell two-for-one, add a free bonus product, change the package shape, put a handle on it, group like products together, add a promotional coupon - and so on.

Then change the movie. Maybe you could put yourself in an art gallery, or a circus, or a toy factory, or your local Kwik-Fit - and notice how different situations can generate even more ideas.

Then try mixing a few movies together – a hospital operating room with an airport check-in queue, a day at the beach with a retail furniture store, a public library with a dog show.

The possibilities are endless. And obviously the more you do this, the better you’ll get.

Why this yields results

We have two main channels for generating ideas – ‘visual’, where we think in pictures, and ‘auditory’, where we think in words.

The visual channel is faster because we can have pictures coming and going in a flash. It’s the mind’s main source of information. The auditory channel, on the other hand, can be useful, but it’s painfully slow. In fact, we can’t ‘think’ language any faster than we can talk it in real life.

And because of the way the mind works, we can’t be in both channels at the same time. So if you’re doing most of your thinking in words, you won’t get nearly as many ideas."

Thanks John.

John Cliff. www.johncliff.com

Great Buzz Marketing Campaigns for IKEA's launch in Frankfurt and Port Island Japan

The new routemaster...

I spent a lot of my time on the 73 and the 38 buses, both routemasters when I lived in Islington. I used them for work, shopping and meeting friends all the time. They were great to hop on and hop off; they took me through the heart of London - a fantastic sight-seeing tour, and quite often had eccentric bus-conducters who I built up a good rapport with - I missed them dearly when they were taken out of service. I loved them in the winter, everyone fought for the seats near the front away from the open door. I loved the 'bang bang' the conductor made when he was up on the top-deck to signal to the driver that the bus should start. The old fashioned ticket-machines, with the long, long tickets...Aaaahhh so many memories.

But, they are going to be reinvented. Here are the new proposals. What do you think?

"Hold very tightly, please, ladies and gentlemen. The announcement of the winner of the mayor of London's competition for the design of a new London bus, or Mk 2 Routemaster, is just around the corner. Here's one of the designs - an electric double-decker called the e21, powered by rechargeable batteries - submitted by Michael Kerz, a graduate of Central St Martin's School of Art and Design.

Given that the original Routemaster, one of the finest of all city buses, appeared at a time when diesel oil was a lot cheaper than it is today, perhaps it's right that a new generation RM should be electric. But, just as the much-missed Routemaster has long been seen as a tourist attraction, so Kerz's design plays on the fact; his e21 boasts a full length transparent roof so tourists can gawp at passing pediments, plane trees and pigeons as Londoners flick through newspapers, grimace along to the thumpa-whompa-tss-tss-tss of personal stereos, doze, eat, drink and fight.

Like the Mk 1 Routemaster, Kerz's Mk 2 sports an open rear platform, beloved by generations of Londoners, but condemned by Transport for London officials as being too dangerous. An automatic safety barrier would keep would-be leapers in control until the bus had stopped, but surely this undermines the very nature of an open platform: the chance to get on and off anywhere along central London's congested streets, no faster than they were in the days of horse-drawn buses.

Kerz, as you can see has tried to borrow something of the Routemaster's profile, but it must be said that the e21 does look just a little angular and brutal compared with the functional elegance of the gently curved original. With its big whizzy wheels and aggressive, cartoon-like stance, the e21 looks better suited to Wacky Races than Route 11.

Next week, we should find out what Transport for London's judges feel about designs from Kerz, other design students, architects - including Norman Foster, whose entry just happens to resemble a trolleybus - engineers, industrial designers and others. The panel, it's good to know, is 100 per cent celebrity-free and composed wholly of those who, if the new bus does go ahead, will run it in daily service.

I suggest that the winning design ought to be in the spirit of the Routemaster and its predecessors, stretching back to the London General B-Type double-decker of 1910, but may well look nothing like it. A true a successor to the Routemaster should be a truly modern city bus designed for a long and trouble-free life and as energy and space efficient as technically possible.

A new Routemaster mustn't be fashionable and it cannot be aimed primarily at the tourist market. It has to be at least 10 times better looking than contemporary London buses, which are bought off the shelf. It doesn't need video screens inside (please not; surely Londoners can still read or simply enjoy looking out of the window?). It needs a quiet engine, however powered, as well as silent brakes. Oh, and it needs a grown-up interior design - unlike 99 per cent of contemporary London buses.

Most of all, the RM2 must be a London bus. London is one of the richest cities in the world, supposedly one of the most creative, and together we must find a way to commission a bus that, one day, will be as famous and as respected as the original Routemaster. We'll soon find out."

The Guardian