Finally
✘ Agenda
GE2134 ✘
✘
Creative Whacks and Thinkertoys
Thinking about Design, Innovation, Technology &
🧛Creative and Critical Thinking in Teams🧛 Information
✘ Team Work
✘ Summing up
Week 9 ✘ Group Project
SemA 2024 ✘ Week 10 – no class but in-class consultation
Overview 1
✘ A variety of strategies and techniques to
generate fresh thinking, new thinking, and
out-of-rut thinking Creative Whacks and Thinkertoys
✘ Individual or in team/group
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Creative Whacks The Right Answer
✘ Get “a whack on the side of the head” ✘ Turn the Roman numeral 6 (VI) into a s 7
✘ Our minds are locked; 10 mental locks by adding a single line
The right answer Limiting our territory ✘ Turn it into a 4 by moving a single line
Being logical Being afraid of foolishness
✘ Now turn the Roman numeral 9 (IX) into a
Following rules Avoiding ambiguity
Being practical Being afraid of error
Not being playful Thinking we’re not creative 6 by adding a single line
✘ A good whack jolts us into thinking along fresh
pathways
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Be practical Thinkertoys
✘ Practicality is the bane of creative thinking ✘ Three requirements for the development of
✗ Be realistic (replaced by “why not?”)
✗ You can’t do it that way (replaced by “Who says?”
✗ That won’t work (replaced by “what if?”)
a creative frame of mind:
1. Intending to be creative
✘ Certainly a value in being practical 2. Cultivating creativity consciously in speech and
✘ What if questions are an easy and effective way to thoughts
3. Acting alike a creative thinker every day
✗
get your creative juices flowing
✗
What if men also had babies?
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What if politicians were elected by lottery?
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What if pigs had wings?
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What if people didn’t need to sleep?
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What if we had eyes in the back of our heads as well as the front?
What if we aged we became younger, living our lives backward?
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10 Thinking tools (thinkertoys) Break habit
1. Set an idea quota 1. Take a different route to work
2. Get tone (ability to pay attention, to notice things, to see better) 2. Change your sleeping hours
3. Don’t be a duke of habit 3. Change your music
4. Feed your head (nourishing our minds with new information and ideas; reading; traveling, …) 4. Read a different newspaper
5. Do a content analysis 5. Make a new friend
6. Create a brain bank 6. Cook a different recipe
7. Be a travel junkie 7. Change the season of your vacation
8. Capture your thoughts 8. Change your reading
9. Think right 9. Watch a different TV channel or show
10. Keep an idea log 10. Go to play or concert instead of a movie, or vice versa
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Using Paradox 2
✘ A paradox is an apparent contradiction that upon closer
security
✘
inspection turns out to reveal an interesting truth
In suspending logic, we create new ideas, which the
Thinking about D
Design, Innovation,
“swirling of opposites” stimulates
Technology & Information
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Innovation Technology
✘ Defined as “significant positive change” ✘ The engine to drive the train of progress
✘ Requires talent ✘ What we want to do with it? How we want to use it?
✘ The change typically involves something new being brought ✘ How it limits us? How it shapes our behaviours?
into being (novum)
✘
✘ ✗
Technology is ambiguous
✗
What is new, however, is almost always built upon what Trade-off
✗
already exists
✘
Consequences are
✗
both good or bad
Productive changes
✘
Constructive and destructive
Benefit or harm
✘
✘
Technology education – a branch of humanities
Being both perceptual and conceptual ✗ To better understand the personal and social, individual and
✘
✗
Innovative idea needs to be clear, simple, and focused public consequences of the technologies we use
Acceptance of technology – a bargain made with the devil
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Technology and Information 3
✘ Technology has created a number of challenges
✘ The “Information Age” – Amount of information received
✘ Unstable – problems of fact and accuracy Team Work
✘ To sort through vast quantities of meaningless “noise”
✘ Another danger is that people tend to value and gravitate
toward easily obtainable information whether that
information is accurate, adequate, or necessary
✘ Our education continues to be a source of information
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Things Researchers and Other Smart People Know
about Working in Teams
✘ The Ability to work in Teams is one of the Top Five
Teams bring a diversity of skills Skills that Employers look for in hiring and
and perspectives to bear on any promoting
✘ Companies that utilize teams in development of
given problem. products, etc. benefit greatly because…
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Things Researchers and Other Smart People Know
Working with Others
about Creativity
✘ People who critically and creatively think are more ✘ Task Processes: Specific interactions that focus on
likely to be successful in school the job at hand
✘ People who critically and creatively think are more ✘ Transactional Processes: interactions that carry
✗
likely to be successful in work settings communication about:
✘ People who think creatively are more likely to ✗
individuals
✗
the team
describe their lives as fulfilling and satisfying the task processes
✘ Without transactional processes, we can’t do the task
processes
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What makes a team? Definition
✘ Work group: Relies primarily on the
individual contribution of its members for A team is a diverse group of people who share
group performance leadership responsibility for creating a
✘ Team: Strives for a magnified impact that group identity in an interconnected effort
is incremental to what its members could to achieve a mutually defined goal within
achieve in their individual roles the context of other groups and systems.
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Mutually defined goal The Different Types of Creative Thinking
Your GE2134 group project ✘ Explorer
✘ Artist
✘ Judge
Communicate intensely to ✘ Warrior
develop goals and ways to
achieve them
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Explorer Explorer
✘ Searches for information and resources ✘ Dares to go where no one has gone before
✘ Provides the Raw Materials from which new ✗ Using only safe routes is not exploration
ideas are made ✘ Need to look in uncharted territory
facts ✘ Need to wander how it all fits in
concepts
✘ Need to feel a little lost
✘ Need to pay attention to unusual patterns
experiences
knowledge
feelings ✘ Need to Use different senses
etc.
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Artist Judge
✘ Evaluates these ideas and decides what can be done
Converts and transforms these resources into
with them
ideas
✘ Takes the raw material and makes something new ✘ Ideas are great, but decisions have to be made!
from it Is this idea good?
experiment with variety of approaches
Is it worth pursuing
Will it give me the return I want?
Ask “what if” questions
Do I have the resources to make it happen?
Break the rules or create new ones
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Judge Warrior
✘ Evaluate and critically weigh the evidence
✘ Look for drawbacks ✘ Implement your Idea!
✘ Wonder if it will work ✘ Take the Idea into Action!
✘ Question your assumptions ✘ Be offensive!
✘ Listen to your gut
✘ Make a Decision!
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Warrior Warrior
✘ Overcome
✘ Need to develop a strategy excuses
✘ Be flexible enough to change it idea killers
✘ Commit yourself to reaching your objective temporary setbacks
other obstacles
✘ Need to have the courage to do what is
necessary
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Review Creative Process
✘ Your Explorer is your role for searching for new ✘ Linear Progression??
information and resources; ✗ Likely you will use Explorer role in
✘ Your Artist is your role for turning those resources earlier stages,
✗ Artist and Judge in the middle stage
into new ideas;
✘ Your Judge is your role for evaluating the merits of
an idea and deciding what to do with it; and
✗ Warrior in the later stages
✘ Your Warrior is your role for carrying your idea into ✘ But, there should be a fair amount of
action. shifting around
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Two Main Reasons for Failure Use It or Lose It
✘ Weak Roles
You have to make a deliberate
✘ Bad Timing
effort to get and keep all of your
11 3
creative roles
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Timing is Everything Getting Stuck in a Role
✘ Explorer: Never get around to making sense of ideas
Knowing when to use your roles
✘ Artist: Spend all your time working and re-working
is vitally important to your your creation & not letting go
success. For example: ✘ Judge: Inhibit your artist and spend so much time
evaluating that you never make a decision
✘ Using your judge when you need to explore ✘ Warrior: Rush into action whether you are ready or
✘ Using your artist to implement your idea not
Need to Shift to Roles when it is Necessary
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Team Work and Creativity Questions….
✘ Describe the Role(s) in the Creative Process
that you Feel Most Comfortable With
✘ Describe the Role(s) that is Most Unfamiliar
and Uncomfortable for you
✘ How could Utilizing a Team be Useful in
the Creative Process?
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4 We are done!
✘ Finally
✘ All lectures done
Summing up ✘ You still have
1. Proposal (tonight by 11:59pm)
2. Final Quiz (next Sat: 09 Nov 2024 @G7510)
3. Group Presentation (Week 11 – 13)
4. Group Report (Week 12 – 14)
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5 Presentation
✘ All members have to take part in preparing
Group Project the PowerPoint and oral presentation
✘ It is 15 minutes instead of 20 minutes
✗ So roughly, it is 3 minutes/member
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Report 6
✘ 2,000 words your ultimate goal
✘ As stated previously in class that if you
have a problem in achieving 2,000 words
Next Week is Week 10
then your word counts could be between NO class
1,800 and 2,200 words
but in-class consultation
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As stated in the
Final Quiz (C01)
GE2134 course
outline
09 Nov 2024, Sat
G7510 (YEUNG, AC1); 12:20pm – 14:20pm
Reporting time: 12:00pm (noon)
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