Koen de Vos, founder of the company Brainssstorm in Brussels and writer of a handbook on brainstorming, had good and bad news for the participants in his workshop. The bad news was that people lose 50,000 brain cells every day. However, the good news was that people can always make new connections between brain cells. “That is the trick. The more connections you make, the more creative you will be”, De Vos explained.

Spray can
Our thinking system processes information based on patterns. Such pattern-thinking helps people to deal with a multitude of activities at the same time, for example when they are driving a car. Pattern-thinking is fast, comfortable and efficient, but results in automatic actions. De Vos demonstrated three different techniques to break with these patterns. For the first one, all participants had to write down at least twenty possible alternative applications of a spray can within five minutes. De Vos explained: “The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas. And the best way to get a lot of ideas, is to defer your judgement. Therefore you have to do it fast, in order to prevent thinking about it.”

Hanging table

For the second technique, called ‘breaking assumptions’, De Vos put forward the design of a table as an example. When we think about such a design, we make certain assumptions, e.g. that such a table should be stable, flat on top and standing on the ground. But what happens if one of these assumptions is not valid? If it is not necessary that the table is standing on the ground, you could design a table that is hanging from a balloon, or floating in a swimming pool.

Under water

For the third brainstorm technique, De Vos randomly chose a word from a dictionary and asked the participants to write down all their associations with this word. Subsequently, they could use these associations as stepping stones for new ideas. In such a way, the word ‘burn’ resulted in the association ‘smoke’, which brought one of the participants to the idea to design an inflatable table, filled with coloured smoke. The workshop was finished with the bizarre suggestion of Yoshiro Nakamats, inventor of the CD, DVD and 3200 other inventions: generating ideas works best under water.

[Els van den Brink]