Practical Creativity - part II: the tools | Tanguy Prevot | Skillshare

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Practical Creativity - part II: the tools

teacher avatar Tanguy Prevot, Industrial Designer / Educator

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      00 Creative Tools Intro

      0:19

    • 2.

      01 Creative Tools 5why

      2:46

    • 3.

      02 Creative Tools XO

      4:07

    • 4.

      03 Creative Tools competitors

      1:36

    • 5.

      04 Creative Tools x ref

      1:16

    • 6.

      05 Creative Tools Systematic

      1:20

    • 7.

      06 Creative Tools Crazy8

      2:24

    • 8.

      07 Creative Tools Duncker

      1:43

    • 9.

      08 Creative Tools Brainstorming

      3:47

    • 10.

      09 Creative Tools Creative Matrix

      2:42

    • 11.

      10 Creative Tools Oxymoron

      1:25

    • 12.

      11 Creative Tools Propelling Question

      3:14

    • 13.

      12 Creative Tools Assumptions

      1:42

    • 14.

      13 Creative Tools Negotiation

      2:26

    • 15.

      14 Creative Tools Free Doodles

      3:01

    • 16.

      15 Creative Tools Flow

      2:46

    • 17.

      16 Creative Tools Summary

      4:03

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About This Class

Whether you are an artist, a designer, an inventor, or an entrepreneur who looks for ways to reboot or boost their creativity and their problem solving skills, this class is for you.

The part I: the mindset is all about understanding how creativity lives in our mind, what boosts it, what freezes it. Hopefully you have taken the class part I, and you are now ready to get into the action. You now feel in control of your mind, and you know that we seriously intend to have fun with creative endeavors.

The part II: the tools reviews several tools and tricks that put in practice the principles described in part I.
For each, I will describe their benefits and the weaknesses or flaws, based on my own experience and of course from my own personal point of view. You will have an opportunity to try and assess which tools work best for you. I even suggest you customize some tools for your own needs!

Some of the tools are more practical and hands-on, some are more intellectual. Some are systematically random just to see where that leads you, and some are pragmatic. In my career, I tailor my process to the project, so they might all become relevant to you some day.

I hope you'll have fun trying it all out!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Tanguy Prevot

Industrial Designer / Educator

Teacher

Hello, I'm Tanguy.

I'm an Industrial Designer with over two decades of experience. It stretches from automotive design to pet food packaging, from tiny agency work to large Fortune 500 corporations and public Universities, in 7 different European countries. To know more details about my path, feel free to check my profile on LinkedIn, Coroflot, or Medium.

My classes focus on workable tools and advice to designers, innovators, makers or entrepreneurs who want to convert their craft or ideas into a startup with exciting products. You own your craft and I bring tips and tricks on how to let it live in a productive context.
The goal is to raise awareness about the importance of a good brief, a healthy start of a project, a reliable process, and the right mindset, so that y... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. 00 Creative Tools Intro: Hi, everyone. So I hope you have enjoyed Part one of this double class about creativity and practical problem solving. Now we go for the Part two, reviewing the tools and methods you can use to improve your performance in creativity. Let's go. 2. 01 Creative Tools 5why: Welcome back. Welcome back to this class about creativity. We are now in the Part two. We're not going to discuss that much our mindset and how we are supposed to approach creativity. We're now going to talk about very specific tools and practices and methodologies that help us achieve what we just discussed that help us overcome our blocks and fears and achieve the best of the creativity that we have within us. The first one is actually an engineering tool. It's called the five ys. Why, why? Why, why, why? The point is something is happening, you observe some kind of failure or some event, and you ask yourself, why has that happened? You find an answer, and you ask yourself, why is that answer actually true? And again again, and again, this way, you really go to the root cause of the problem. The point is that you shouldn't confuse problem with symptom. I really like this example of sciatica. You have pain in your leg, but the problem is actually in your back. I've had projects where it was literally like this. I was designing a respirator and we made prototypes. People testing them complained about pressure point and pain on the nose, and I solved it by redesigning the chin of the mask to rebalance the mask and reduce the pressure on the nose. So do not get confused between a symptom and a problem. What you are trying to achieve needs to be very, very clearly understood, clear to you, anyway. And removing symptoms in some medical fields like palliative treatment is, of course, all it's about. But in general, crafts and arts and um, creative endeavors. The problem is more important than the symptom. You're trying to achieve something. You want to make people feel something. You want to transmit a message with your art. And Again, it's the outcome, the message that matters, not really the support that matters. So focus on really separating symptoms and outputs and artifacts from what you are really achieving, which is what people experience, how people feel, how much people enjoy looking, listening, experiencing what you're doing. 3. 02 Creative Tools XO: Another very important tool is the experience outcome. It's basically a sentence that describes one of the things you are trying to achieve with your new idea. It goes like this, lets the user, but that could be another person. We'll get into that. Job to be done, what are we trying to achieve and success criteria. It's a very convenient way to phrase your problem statement like this because first of all, you need to know exactly who you're talking about. Is it the user? Is it maintenance person? Is it a professional operator? Is it the parent of the user, someone involved in what's going on? You need to know who that is. And then that person is trying to achieve a task, get the job done. And that usually when you create a product or a solution or a little device or even an art piece, there's probably more than one thing that you try to achieve at a time. So experience outcomes in such sentences, you're going to have three, four, five, ten of those, but at least you know specifically for each sub task what you are trying to achieve and success criteria. If you try to make something lighter, it's not meaning anything because because if you save 100 grams on a two ton product, it doesn't make any sense. You need to have success criteria. You need to know in advance before searching for ideas before being creative, you need to know precisely what you're trying to achieve and with what level of success. Preferably measurable. If it's about making things lighter, either you decide by how many grams it's lighter or you decide by how many percent's lighter than what specifically, your previous solution or the competitor solution, something like this. To be creative, of course, I invite you to be ambitious in those things. So you make that experience outcome, the most desirable possible. Let the installer attach this to the ceiling without tools. Let's install attach to the ceiling with one hand without climbing on the ladder. The different success criteria are going to frame your problem statement in such a way that you can find solutions. You're going to look for ideas on how to do it without tools, and you're not going to be disturbed or lost into a broad topic. And then after spending half an hour on that, you can spend half an hour on getting that job done. With one hand, and you're going to have other ideas because you have framed the problem differently. So define your problem carefully this way and then go for creative sessions trying to find the solutions. There is a trick there. It's about how abstract you go. Let's say that I say we talk about we are making MP three players in the past, and we frame the problem as lets the user store more songs on his MP three player. If you do that, you do an MP three player. If you phrase the experience outcome by lets the user access infinite quantity of songs anytime anywhere, then it's not necessarily an NP three player. It can be an online cloud based source of music, a platform, which is basically what people use today without knowing that in the past, everything needed a physical support. So the way you frame your experience outcome, the way you frame the problem, the challenge that you're trying to solve, is going to define how open and creative you can be or how tactical and pragmatic you will be. 4. 03 Creative Tools competitors: So obviously competitors and adjacencies, in other words, inspiration. Looking at what the others are doing is always a good start. First of all, it helps you know what has been solved, what needs to be done. It helps you avoid redoing what's already known. It helps you start from a richer ground than if you just don't know anything about the topic. So looking at competitors and adjacencies, if you are doing safety device for some job that is happening outside, outdoor, then why not look at outdoor sports, climbing or things like this? Because they also deal with safety in the outdoors and with the weather and so on. So learn from the others in your field, learn from the others in neighboring fields. And the goal is to put the right purpose in the right context. That means you need to fully understand the context where your work is going to be used or experienced. You need to understand by whom, with who around, and what they are trying to achieve. What's the purpose of it? And then you need to see if that purpose is matching the context if you are able to deliver something that fulfills that purpose in that context, and you do that first by learning how the others have tried, what they achieved, how close they got to success, and you start from there. 5. 04 Creative Tools x ref: Here is a very, very, very pragmatic way to look at things. Basically, you look at the tools you know, the assets, the systems you already have in place, and the things you're trying to achieve. And you just look at what's been done and maybe there is a combination that has never been done. In this case, we talk about company that had different kind of candies and chewing gums, et cetera. They looked at the kind of packaging that was existing and available. And they found out that at that point in the 80s, nobody had sold chewing gum in a tube. So they just did. It was a big hit. It was super cool. The advantage, to be honest as a consumer, was that as a kid, you could put pretty much the whole tube in your mouth and completely overdo and there was some, um, it had removed the limits in terms of dosing the size of the chewing gum, and that was super cool. So simple, stick to what you know, list what you know in the different axes, what you have as tools, what you're trying to do, and find stuff that hasn't been done, combinations that have not been done yet and build upon what you have. 6. 05 Creative Tools Systematic: Oh, this is a tool that may seem like the opposite of glam and fun, but it's basically systematic flip, systematically doing things. If you are stuck white page, you know, feeling like you don't know where to start, how to get moving with your new art piece and your new craft, just get going, start something. Systematically in here an example, black plus white, what does it do? It does gray or it does black next to white. Maybe in the other direction or maybe I can make a diagonal or maybe I get to a checkered flag and you keep going like this, just senseless experiment without really knowing where it goes, but you just go for and in a very systematic fast pace, you throw things on the wall to see what sticks and eventually you might even invent the next QR code. So it's really about inverting, flipping, mirroring, swapping, scanning up and down, stretching, distorting, make things that are obvious. Don't worry about that. Make things that don't make any sense. Don't worry about that, do it and see where it goes. The unexpected thing that comes out of it might become a masterpiece actually. 7. 06 Creative Tools Crazy8: The crazy eight is basically last minute panic on time. You give yourself 8 minutes to find eight solutions to a problem that you have defined. So you have a sentence that describes a problem to solve, and you go for 8 minutes, eight ideas. It's quite easy to start, have one idea, two idea, three ideas. Four, five, six gets trickier, and honestly, seven and eight is very difficult. I mean, if you have just 1 minute to have an idea and write it down, just the time to write it down is already consuming most of your minute. So it is really forcing you to be extra spontaneous and there's clearly no time for overthinking, worrying, hesitating, et cetera. The quantity, eight ideas is really you get to the point where the number eight is something you don't believe. You write stuff that you didn't think you would write such a thing half an hour ago. But that's the point. It gets you beyond what you would have done with all your psychological logs and cultural logs. You go beyond the obvious. It's really effective if you are able to do that on your own and then a colleague or friend does that and then you compare your notes. You make fun of it because, of course, there is some nonsense in there, but actually the fun and the nonsense put together are a very good fertile ground for creative ideas. It's really, um an easy trick to force your brain to allow you to say things that you wouldn't say normally. It's quite similar to the advice that some people say to write down 100 ideas on how to solve a problem and it's the same story. The number 20, 30, 50, and 100, there's a lot of nonsense in there because you are forced to write whatever passes through your mind because you don't have time or because you just need the quantity and you don't know how to generate 100 absolutely brilliant things that you are very confident about. Talked in Part one about confidence, and that's the point here. It's a tool that helps you ignore whether you are confident or not. You just throw ideas on the paper. 8. 07 Creative Tools Duncker: And what about the box? You know, everybody talks about thinking outside the box. Of course, that's a well known tool. But here where they bring an interesting little experiment is Dunkers candle problem. And basically, you have two groups of people. One group of people receive what you see on figure A, matches, pushpins in a box and a candle and they are asked to somehow attach the candle to the wall and light it up. Now, the interesting part is that if one group receives the push pins in the box, and another group receives the pushpins like a bunch of them, and then the box separately, they have a very different way to look at it. If the box is separated, people understand it as one of the tools that they can use. If the pins are in the box, some people tend to think of the box as packaging. They're basically not considering the box and they not use it. So again, look at the assets, look at what you have, look at what you know. There's stuff that you have that you haven't thought of using most probably. And with that, it can be an idea. It can be a tool. It can be, I don't know, if you are using brushes, maybe you can use the handle of the brush on your canvas and things like this, just um, keep an open mind and look at everything you have around you and all the possible ways to use stuff you haven't used yet or misuse things and turn things into a new tool, a new way to operate. 9. 08 Creative Tools Brainstorming: Brainstorming is probably the name that is the most used by most people when it comes to ideation methods. There are very big challenges with brainstorming. It's about having a team. It's about having a team of the right size. It's about having a team of people who know how to be creative and open minded and say things in a spontaneous way, but without interrupting each other and without having any sarcastic or negative tone in what they are saying, and I personally find that very difficult. I advise everyone to have fun and make jokes and make fun of the others and sarcasm is part of my culture. So brainstorming is really difficult to implement for people like me. I take it as conversation between folks who understand the question. The point is that people should have a yes and attitude. Someone says something and you say yes and if we do that or if we change that, it gets even better. Don't say no. But I think a touch of sarcasm and irony and jokes and just, you know, taking it easy and not taking ourselves too seriously is necessary for creativity. But yeah, take a few experts on the topic of the problem, add a person who might not be an expert, but is good at facilitating things and let them have a focused conversation on how to solve the problem that usually works. Now on that note, to be honest, there is this book, the IDA Machine that I think is not available on the market anymore. I read it about 30 years ago, but I remember that this was about an agency that was facilitating and organizing and running brainstormings and ideation sessions. And they had an interesting take which was to always add some external teenager into the group, someone who was there to cause a bit of disruption and have a kind of mischievous attitude. So they would have a team of um real decision makers from their customer, not just the average guy, they would want the bosses and the decision makers in the room. Then they would bring that teenager that had absolutely no constraint on social classes and behavioral respect and so on, and that teenager would go ask all the annoying questions and challenge all the decisions and so on. And that would bring the friction that really helps going beyond the obvious Um, that's what I remember from the book that I found very interesting. And the point is there debating. I believe that debating is a human right. Just go for it, challenge people. It doesn't matter what title they have, remove the social boundaries, and, you know, go for it. It's a tango. It's emotional. It's, um, intense and do it as if nobody's watching. Like, just have that real conversation. Do not be afraid of friction. Do not be afraid of a bit of confrontation. If you bring a lot of humor and jokes and make fun of yourself in the process, people are fine with that, and they come out of the session exhausted, but with really interesting notes and some new learnings and new insights and findings. 10. 09 Creative Tools Creative Matrix: Now, an alternative to brainstorming is the creative matrix. It's, let's say, a written form of it. So you have a big white board on which you make a matrix. In columns, you put your experience outcomes or basically opportunities or problems that you're trying to solve, what you're trying to achieve. And on the other axis, you put the user, the maintenance person, the installer, basically the persona that you're trying to solve that problem for, and you ask a group of people with you to come up with ideas instead of talking and interrupting each other and so on, like the challenges you would have with the brainstorming, you ask people to do it in written on sticky notes. Um, with a big fat marker so that they are limited to a pictogram or three, four words, not a long complex thing. And you ask people all at once to go put ideas as fast and as many as possible on the wall. There is something good about this. It's first of all, that even the shy ones can go put a post it on a wall at the same time as someone else. They don't need to wait for a long silence to their speaking. And then also, there's the reactive thing. In my experience in agency, for example, we had customers who wanted something, but they didn't know what that was. They were very good at not liking what we proposed. They know what they don't want when they see it, but very few people are good at knowing what they want. So people are good at reacting to stimulus, they're not so great at having a vision. And this tool lets you react. Let's say I put a post with some idea and you read it and you think, I'm wrong or I missed something, you put another one next to it that is enhancing my idea or that is challenging my idea. And basically, this is all allowed. You are allowed to disagree. You are allowed to expand on other people's like everything is allowed in brainstorming as well, but in a formal structure that I think is more difficult on post its, everybody can express themselves at the same time and everybody can react to what the others are putting on the wall. Of course, this requires after lecture, meaning, I mean, a reading where people altogether read what everyone has written and start discussing what did you mean and so on and then take proper notes of where that leads. Um, for me, that's the brainstorming for introverts and it really, really works. 11. 10 Creative Tools Oxymoron: Since we talk about creativity and trying to go beyond the obvious and do things that surprises others, going for quirky and awkward solution is a pretty good start. Basically, do the things that you think others wouldn't there is a way to explore the unknown. And so here's an example of making jokes and, you know, basically dad jokes are jokes kind of thing. But it really, I think, helps to go for oxymorons, paradoxes, tease people, play with words. All these things again, are not necessarily directly linked to your craft or the technique that you are implementing. But thinking in terms of oxymorons is just a way to be creative, a way to break the rules, a way to do what the others wouldn't do. And then it may not be the proper solution, but it's a trigger that gets you onto a path that you can follow towards the best solution or the creative solution. So again, fun puns, you know, pranks, making jokes, um, exploiting the paradox between different concepts is a good way to get started. 12. 11 Creative Tools Propelling Question: The propelling question is an amazing tool. Basically, you start from a huge ambition and you add a very, very significant constraint, basically, an obstacle that you don't really have, but you just invent for yourself an obstacle in front of your very bold ambition, and that's really stretching it and forcing you and your colleagues and friends to be particularly creative and to have this we can achieve it if we do this and we do that. And here's an example of how they asking themselves, how can we win the race 24 hours mn race? How can we win the race when our cars are not faster than anyone else's? So that really is a way to look outside of the box, basically, to look at their role. They understood that they are not there to make fast cars. They are there to win the race. Making fast cars is part of it, but it's not the only thing. And also, they were intelligent enough, wise enough to realize that it's not obvious to make cars that are significantly faster than all the other great brands out there. So they decided to basically save time on the pit stops. And when you have a 24 hour race, if you save a few minutes, you actually win the race. So this is an interesting way to look at what you're doing, trying to achieve something or let's say you have a problem that is kind of of normal intensity, you can artificially make it extremely difficult because that's going to force you to consider ideas that you would not come up with otherwise without that extra challenge, and then you can always apply those exciting ideas onto a simpler problem later. There is another element to this. I mentioned thinking outside of the box and I like to talk about thinking around the box, basically thinking like a system engineer. You zoom out and you look at all the other aspects of the problem. In the case of winning a race, it's not only about driving fast, it's the whole race that counts from the beginning to the end, including the pit stops. If you are creating a device that is used in a context, let's say you create something that is used in a surgery room, then do take in consideration all the equipment that is by default in that surgery room and connect your device to that instead of adding duplication of monitors and screens, for example. Um, if you are an artist, same thing, maybe you can actually use um, the art gallery. I remember seeing some street artist that is putting a canvas on a wall and then he painting is on the canvas, but also on the wall, basically overlapping and making a metaphor of um the art in gallery and the art in the street. So again, look at the context where you are and leverage. 13. 12 Creative Tools Assumptions: Now let's take an example where we are in the family. There are two kids and there's one orange left. You can visualize it. One orange in the bamboo tray in the kitchen. To kids want the orange. What is the mother going to do? Most people would expect the mother to cut the orange in two. Some would say ask one kid to cut the orange, the other kid to choose the half they want and trying to make it a fair division of the orange. If you think creatively, you realize that perhaps one kid wants the juice to drink and the other kid wants the peel to flavor muffins. They don't have both the same goal with that orange and if you don't fully understand that, if you don't understand the real problem, then you don't find another way to share the orange. There is always an assumption. There is an assumption in the mind of the one writing the brief. There is an assumption in your mind when you read the brief, and you need to challenge those assumptions. Always challenge the assumptions, ask people what they really mean, ask people what the context really is, who is trying to achieve what. And then you will find a lot of opportunities that they were there from the beginning. But if you don't ask those questions, if you don't investigate, you just don't see them. So in this case, really, really, really consider who is asking for what, and what are they trying to achieve and who is playing what role, where and how can you orchestrate that for the best outcome. 14. 13 Creative Tools Negotiation: So here are the most typical and effective ways to tackle a problem in a creative way. It's about wording. What if we do this? What happens? And don't judge it. Just ask yourself, if I do that, what happens? And why should I not do this? Can we do this? No. Why not? What's going to happen? Let others in your team really phrase it, express it, verbalize it, illustrate it, visualize. Explore those scenarios. What if we do this? What if we don't do that, and why can't we do that? What would be the consequence? Maybe the consequence is acceptable. Maybe the consequence is just that you need to change another thing because there is a kind of domino effect. Let's assume for a second that we are allowed to do this. Then what happens? Let's assume for a second that we have solved that first level of the problem. Are we going to be able to solve the next level of the problem? Yes, if, if is a very good way to say no. If someone is asking you to do something impossible in the next two weeks and it's important client and you don't want to offend them, you say, yes, if your budget is that much and you allow me to hire that many people from that famous agency to work with us. Probably they are not going to be able to provide you that, but you have not said no, you have defined a framework that can start negotiation. Problem solving and creativity is very often a negotiation. I talked earlier about creating tension and not being afraid of confrontation. But again, this is not a destructive process, confrontation for the sake of confrontation is not very productive. Usually, it's more about negotiation. If I do that, what do I get? What do you get? What's the outcome? Is this what we're trying to achieve? Is it closed what we're trying to achieve and so on. Negotiate, explore, do not block on anything, go through the work of describing what would happen if we make some decision, even if you have the intuition that it's not the right path, describing it, illustrating it, visualizing it is a way to be sure, that's not the right path, or a way to find there an opportunity to do something differently. 15. 14 Creative Tools Free Doodles: Now back to just enjoying what we're doing. Free doodles, you know, letting loose and just doing your thing, doing your craft. Warm up is part of practice. Practice is part of the game, and the game is leading to the outcome that you want. So if you're in a craft, in an art form, just keep practicing, include warm up. Don't worry too much. Do things for the sake of doing them, do parts of it. Let's say you are very good musician, but there is one little thing, one special effect or part of a song that you struggle with, then just practice that bit or practice the foundational tools that are going to lead to you being able to do that thing. It's part of the game, it's part of creativity, just enjoy the whole thing. Do not focus on the end output on the perfect execution. Just focus on enjoying the process. Trust yourself, trust the tools, enjoy the motions. As a colleague used to tell me many years ago in Italy, sporkaacarta, make the paper dirty. His point was that it's more important to sketch things and look for ideas and experiment with shapes than to worry about the quality of a design. When it's about practicing, as you can see here, this is about sketching shapes. I have no idea where I'm sketching. I'm just doing things and convex concave, one thing in front of the other, one thing casting shadow on the other, and just trying things out and see where it goes. At the end of the day, it's about mileage of the pen. It's about training your brain to control things. It's about learning to do things fast and spontaneous without worrying too much, finding confidence in my tools, finding confidence in myself. Just have fun. Here I sketched something that started to look like half a face of a robot, so I thought, why not an eyebrow? Take it easy, enjoy the process, enjoy the game, play for the game, play for the love of the game, not for the points, and you're going to find new things. You're going to come up with ideas that are just going to be like, why not? Then in the next or next or next next page, you can come back to this and experiment again with a shape that came up just in a pencil warmup exercise. 16. 15 Creative Tools Flow: Love your tools, know your tools. Mike neck said form follows tool, and he's got a point, and it's completely matching what Paul Arden said. If you get stuck, draw with a different pen. Change your tools. I may free your thinking. So whatever it is you're doing in your craft, just explore experiment with different tools, understand them, love them for what they can do, love them for what they help you do, and just respect that. There are things they can't do and change tool when you want to do the thing that they can't do. My father was a craftsman and he used to say good worker or good craftsman makes his own tools. So he would spend time preparing his tools in order to preparing in order to prepare his work. I think it's really part of it in creative problem solving, in creative arts, in whatever form you're doing, just leverage the tool for what it's good at and be aware of its weaknesses and flows. There is no magic tool that does it all. There is no magic tool that lets you express yourself fully. Give it some love, give it some care, and choose either carefully or randomly and see where that leads you. Along those lines, it an anecdote many years ago, I found myself in an apartment where I didn't have electricity yet, and so I was spending my evenings sketching a candlelight. And what I realized is that because there was not so much light, I spontaneously intuitively increased contrast because I just needed to see what I'm sketching, that really helped me sketch with contrast. It helped my confidence because I actually didn't really see what I was doing. So I just kept going without worrying too much. Then the next day you wake up, there's daylight, you see what you've achieved, and you're like, did I just do? Last night. Amazing. I didn't think I was able to do that. So just go with the flow, learn your tools, learn what they can do. Sometimes putting yourself in a less comfortable situation like less light is helping you in practicing sketching and things like this. Maybe if you are a writer, try different I don't know. I'm sure that writing by hand or on a typewriter or on a computer or using a dictaphone is different way of creating text. So experiment, go for it and enjoy the result. 17. 16 Creative Tools Summary: So what have we learned today? Let's summarize this. What we've seen is that those creativity tools, they keep us focused on a target, on the outcome. We are working on bigger things than just the output, the artifact. Those creativity tools require some domain knowledge, of course, if you are looking for solutions on a problem, you need to have some knowledge and understand the problem. We've seen that creativity tools can be systematic. It's sometimes uncomfortable way to work through the unknown to just keep applying the tool and keep going. They simulate last minute panic, but on time, they put us in situations where we are under pressure so that we go beyond the locks of our mind, the locks of our culture, the locks of our fear. They force us to come up with plenty of quantity so that we go beyond the obvious, we venture into the nonsense, and then we get to the actual brilliant ideas. It's also pushing us to leverage the context. There is nothing that happens on its own. Everything lives in a context. Everything lives in the context of who is going to enjoy it, who is going to experience it, where, in what environment, with whom, and which conditions. And I am a strong advocate of awkward, quirky, funny pranks, jokes and triggers and teasing and sarcasm and everything because that's an easy way to break the rules and explore. It doesn't mean to be mean or annoying with the others. It means just exploring with a good sense of humor. Um, talking about that, it's about collaboration. Always ask for feedback if you are in an art form or in a profession that is kind of lonely where you work alone, still, you can ask family friends for feedback and take it on board, experiment with that, and hopefully that helps you work better, faster. Some of those creative tools demand that we question assumptions. I think it's fundamental. Misunderstandings are a problem and an obstacle, but they can also be a tool. So explore them, dig into misunderstandings and find where is the opportunity. Those creative tools help us accept unlikely hypothesis as a way forward. Yeah, except things. We talked about the what if and why not. And let's assume for a second. So this is really accepting that we are into a territory where we don't really want to venture spontaneously. But by doing the work and going there, we actually find the opportunities. It's about experimenting, practicing, practicing, practicing over and over and over because quantity drives quality. And it requires trust. It requires self trust. Just find a way to get into the flow, find a way to feel comfortable in the uncomfortable position of not knowing what you're doing, find a way to be comfortable in the unknown, and then you will create those things that make you feel comfortable, those things that make you feel like you have achieved something. At the end of the day, that's what it's about achieving things. Enjoy trying. That's the most important part. If you need to win to be happy, it's going to happen a few times in your life. If playing and practicing and trying to win keeps you happy, then you're going to be happy most of the days. And the occasional victory is just a cherry of the cake, and that's just wonderful. Enjoy trying.