The ideation process
A place to save my thoughts on brainstorming and how to streamline it
The ideation process
Sometimes the process of thinking looks like needless chaos from the outside
But thats what creatives should be doing.
Banging on random objects just to see what it might shake out.
Creatives need to make a mess in order to arrive at clarity.
I’ve always had this sense that if you build a container for something, you will make things to fill it. What I frequently do is try to figure out different containers. A website is a container.
The Forbidden Zone
In his 2012 essay, “More people should write,” writer and programmer James Somers described this process as creating a mental bucket for an idea, thereby unleashing a magnetic force between that idea and the world:
... See moreWhen I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a
Whether my creative ideas are rooted in an immediate context window or not a box is required. my head is also a box, but not a good one at storing ideas
It’s not the tool, it’s the facilitator.
Why creatives hate brainstorming. Or is it just me?
But input is only as good as the people we reflect upon matters with.
Matt Klein • The META Trending Trends: 02025
Now, the spark file itself is not all that unusual: that's why Moleskins or Evernote are so useful to so many people. But the key habit that I've tried to cultivate is this: every three or four months, I go back and re-read the entire spark file. And it's not an inconsequential document: it's almost fifty pages of hunches at this point, the length ... See more
Steven Johnson • The Spark File
Our ideas, too, will disappoint us if we don’t give them the right environment to develop in. They’ll be shallow, derivative, dull, repetitive, or take too long to show up. Or they’ll just not show up at all. We must find the perfect glass jar and lid for them to appear in.
What is that perfect glass jar, though? Our ideas appear primarily in one s... See more
What is that perfect glass jar, though? Our ideas appear primarily in one s... See more