by Flemming Funch
I was talking with Bruce Baumrucker on the phone amongst other things about creating online spaces that foster creativity or that stimulate creative problem solving. There's a lot of neat things one can do that tends to activate creativity and takes one out of one's old habits and patterns of thinking. For example, the old technique of looking up a couple of random words in the dictionary and pretending that they have a relation to your problem and seeing where that will take you. Quite often one will develop some ideas that are totally unexpected, but useful. Bruce was mentioning that Roget's Thesaurus has numeric codes that can also be used for taking you into different directions, by exploring what else exists in the same code as what you started with. Many more things one can do, of course. In general this is what is called lateral thinking. Instead of just pressing on, trying to solve your problem linearly, it is often more useful to step to the side in a new direction and see what one finds. At any rate, one of my plans is to make online "creativity rooms" that provide tools for that kind of thing.
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