This is an exercise to generate ideas. The set words are: Seaside Childhood Angry Festival. The task is to “brainstorm” around each word, establishing a list of associated words and also link words and develop ideas through a spider diagram.
I am also choosing to use coloured paper for my spider diagrams to help reflect the word eg, blue for sea (seaside), green for growth (childhood), red (Angry), yellow (Festival)
Starting with the word Seaside, the process begins with considering all the ideas, themes, experiences and thoughts about the seaside. The resultant list is provided below:-
The additional words are from google, dictionaries and thinking slightly beyond the obvious theme, eg ocean feels far more expansive than sea-side and is a different concept. The highlighted words are those which are the most popular after asking friends and associates to cross check with their thoughts on the sea-side.
The words Tide and Pier are words contributed by friends and they do really encompass the sea-side. They have been written in the spider diagram in blue. There are areas on the diagram that interlink. I could place Tide, Swimmers and Windsurfers near the word Sea or use the word Swim rather than Swimmers. Or place Deck-chairs near to Promenade. I feel this process is flexible and provides freedom in creating ideas.
Now the word Childhood:-
Cross checking my list with friends the words most associated with Childhood are: School, Friends and Stories, in keeping with the Unicef definition for childhood being the time for children to be in school and at play.
Rather than making the spider diagrams personal to my own childhood the words tend to be general so that the majority can relate to them. However I am adding the word Memories which someone suggested and is a lovely word because it allows for that personal experience of childhood to be included. Other words friends mentioned are Dens and Adventure.
The next word Angry is all about emotion:-
Again scanning through dictionaries various additional words are listed . However I decide not to include these in the spider diagram as they go just that step beyond the more direct association to anger and the word Wrath is not so often used today. Also some of the words are interchangeable eg annoyed/irritable.
There were no further words that others could offer apart from the word Fume. Someone mentioned Righteous as in righteous anger. however although this would be interesting to discuss, I decide to leave it out as it is not self-explanatory.
Out of the four words given, the word Anger/Angry is about emotion. Friends tell me they find this word the most difficult to develop ideas from. I consider including related themes of Repentance and Forgiveness would be diverting too much from the immediate subject matter for the purposes of this exercise.
Finallly: Festival
I feel I have missed the obvious word here ie Celebration and add this to my spider diagram. I like the words colour, fun, activity that others mention. One person says “pinata”. I have no idea what this is and have to ask for details – “A piñata is a container often made of papier-mâché, pottery, or cloth; it is decorated, and filled with small toys or candy, or both, and then broken as part of a ceremony or celebration” Next time I attend a festival I shall look our for these.
I find these spider diagrams a surprising process. I have visited brainstorming in the past however not in such an established way and forgotten how effective it can be in really focusing and thinking around a subject. The word “Childhood” proved challenging in keeping to more general words and excluding personal context. I also have kept more to nouns in regard to the “Seaside”and “Festival” rather than descriptive emotions .
If I were to repeat this exercise I would reduce the number of arrows in the spider diagrams as so many of the words are interconnected and link in different directions. I would simply connect with arrows from the central word and draw lines connecting the other words together.
I have tried not to over-complicate the spider diagrams so the ideas do not go too beyond the main themes.
Sharing in the generation of ideas with others I found the most helpful in coming up with interesting words and I am delighted to have learned something new (pinata) through completing this exercise.
Further information (following course feedback):-
In the book “Designing Your Life” written by engineers Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, there is a chapter about prototyping and brainstorming. Here it is explained that brainstorming was first described by Alex Osborn in a book published in 1953 called Applied Imagination. Alex described a method of generating ideas that relied on two rules: generating a large quantity of ideas without concern for quality and deferring judgement. Brainstorming continues to be based on these two rules.
Bill Burnett & Dave Evans give emphasis to the importance of framing a good question in order to set up a brain storming session. However the question should not contain the solution nor should it be so general that it is meaningless. They endorse a relaxed atmosphere, even brain-storming with Play-Doh ! to help switch off from the every day and come up with plenty of ideas. So their rules for Brainstorming listed in their book are:-
- Go for quantity not quality
- Defer judgement and do not censor ideas
- Build off the ideas of others (ie collective creativity)
- Encourage wild ideas (these may be seeds to something new)
Then once the ideas have been generated they can be categorized:-
- The most exciting
- The preferred ones if all necessary resources were available
- The ones which probably will not work, however what if it did….
- The ones which will make a great change
- Ones if only we could ignore the rule of physics ….
So this process helps at looking at possibilities and actionable choices in many situations and can be applied here in this course to good effect.
Reference:-
Burnett, B. & Evans, D. (2018), Designing Your Life, Penguin Random House UK.
Adelaide Art 