by Ed Barguiarena, Creative Director
Have you ever examined something, I mean really examined it? Listened, looked, read, experienced, immersed yourself. It could be something based in the arts or based somewhere else. Exploring with curiosity and opening yourself up to the questions and concepts that arise can lead to new pathways to enhancing your own projects. When you explore, don’t expect things to make sense—that’s too much pressure—just observe, notice, take note. Anything that seems unimportant can be discarded or saved for later. I know this might seem a little artsy in a business context—remember that the essence of creativity has universal applications.
The goal: Generate ideas from seemingly unrelated fields and use them for your own purposes. All your brain needs is a suggestive spark to make a novel and new connection. Exploring in this way can provide that spark.
If the resulting ideas are not useful, don’t over think it. Keep going. This is a process. What you’re really doing is developing an approach to problem solving that is purposefully open-ended. This is a skill that requires practice. The solution to your problem is probably living at the fringes of “business as usual.”
Ask your brain to connect two things that seem to be unconnected and you’ve created a riddle that your brain wants to solve. New ideas await.