During a Fine Arts class on a February morning, my teacher challenged our class to find new ideas in ordinary objects. He referenced our recent Literature assignment — to write a letter from the perspective of the ocean — and then randomly picked up a plastic bottle and a piece of paper which resembled a letter. “Instead of just writing a letter from the ocean,” he said, “let’s imagine the ocean thousands of years from now finding this bottle with a letter from the last human on earth.”
The lesson was simple, but the impact was not. This simple reframing taught me that creativity doesn’t always require grand concepts. Sometimes, a truly original idea is just waiting to be discovered by connecting the things we see every day.
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Breaking Free from Fixed Mindsets
Our brains are wired to categorize and organize information. We tend to see objects only for their primary, intended function (e.g., a paperclip is for holding papers) and are less likely to develop new uses for them.
Relational thinking challenges this by asking, What else could this be related to? or How could this be used in an entirely different context? This act of reframing breaks us out of conventional thinking and opens up a world of new possibilities.
Many Inventions Are Created This Way
The advent of anesthesia was created by combining the notion of nitrous oxide (also known as laughing gas) with the notion of reducing pain during surgery.
Notions can also be used to create even more notions.
For example, the Post-It note. New uses for Post-It notes were the result of the notion of a Post-It note being combined with other notions: marking pages in a book, annotating documents without marring them, and brainstorming, to name but a few.
This Could Potentially Explain Why Children Are More Creative
A series of studies shows that performance on divergent thinking tasks drops significantly throughout childhood. This may suggest that children become less able to perform creative challenges as they get older.
Children don’t tie themselves to an existing idea; instead, they try to make new combinations between objects, usually because they actually know less information. Since adults already know the rules or general purpose of objects or situations, their prior knowledge inhibits their creativity.