Incase you missed week 1 of the creative design lab, view it here.

To begin the creative process this week, I drew shapes related to specific emotions. (I find it interesting how anger and excitement are quite closely related). This was an example of synectics – “the fitting together of seemingly diverse elements”. Emotion doesn’t have a shape, but somehow I couldn’t see happiness as anything other than rounded and circular, and excitement as being spiky.

“Embrace the seemingly irrelevant”

The next stage of our mobile app project involved combining seemingly unrelated topics, to generate new ideas for apps. We focussed on quantity, didn’t criticise each others ideas, developed on each others ideas and welcomed more unusual thoughts. The following is a collection of completely uninhibited app ideas, from the mundane to the insane.

We then picked three ideas to take a little further using analogies to look at the problem differently. We generated direct, personal, fantasy and symbolic analogies for each of the three ideas below.

I found the fantasy and symbolic analogies the most useful in this context. I was quite surprised at how effective this activity was. I found myself looking at the app idea from a completely different angle than before.

We decided that we were going to take forward the idea of an educational food app.