the challenge
Today we are playing with a ReShape Seed, which means our creative exploration trigger is based on a shape instead of a textual Seed.
my insight
It took me only seconds to find this too-good-to-be-true Insight. And soon after that I found a few more, including the ‘O’ key on my keyboard. Have a look at yours, can you see the ReShape Seed in it?
Why was that so easy and why I still consider it to be a creative Insight? Let’s reflect on that.
reflection
All the Insights I captured today were derived from the immediate visual I used as a trigger — they all imitate the shape on the Seed (or the other way around).
That’s only way approach to play with the Seed, but let’s leave that for tomorrow, when I will play with the same Seed but with a different mindset.
So, what’s so unique about the short creative process I went through today? With the ReShape Seed and how I applied it today, my creative exploration was literally like looking through a very specific pair of glasses. Focusing on the abstract shape made my brain focus on this visual and try to match it to things I saw around me. And obviously it succeeded in that task. And the reason for that is that our brain is really good at such pattern-matching activities, if we just put our mind to it.
Now, this is not that different from playing with a regular, textual Seed. But it is a more natural activity for us. Working with a textual Seed is often harder because it should go through several transformations in our brain. And the more abstract the text is, the bigger the challenge.
So, if that’s such an easy task, what does it have to do with creativity? Well, as easy as it might be, we normally don’t notice such things around us. I go through this door almost every day, but only today I stopped for a second to observe it.
Observing and noticing such details, finding the beauty in them or just assuming they have some potential future use, is one of the pillars of creativity. External triggers such as the one I used today can help us focus on details around us more naturally, even when we use a simple visual pattern matching.
Tomorrow, I will try to increase the challenge by taking the same ReShape Seed, and capture an Insight inspired by it *but not visually similar to the shape.
mental notes
- Even the simplest pattern-matching exercise can help us explore, observe, and discover details we usually miss.
now it is your turn… be creative!