5 Fresh Ways to Spark Creativity
Check out some unusual strategies
for jumpstarting your creative juices.
Sometimes you just need some fresh tips on how
to think creatively. I
know I do, anyway. So I went to ScrollMotion co-founder and chief creative
officer Josh Koppel. It's Koppel's job to help big companies such as GE,
Campbell's, and Hallmark think innovatively about how they come up with interactive tablet apps.
"We're
not supposed to be just taking PowerPoints, PDFs, and essentially putting paper
on a tablet. That's the enemy," Koppel says.
In
other words, he helps brands get out of creative ruts. Feel like you could use
a little assistance in that area? Read on for Koppel's tips.
Play around with technology in novel ways.
Koppel
says he remembers when QuickTime came out and instead of using it to watch
movies he used it to slow videos down frame by frame.
"I
was so enamored with the idea of being able to slow something down and that was
clearly not what it was intended for," he says. "I remember once I
took this video of myself doing all these different faces and then I just used
the scrubber to create something like a digital puppet."
Another
thing he admits to doing: making music with a phone's dial pad.
"A
lot of what I do is daydreaming and playing with stuff. I think play is
probably one of the most important things in terms of creating innovation," he says.
Immerse yourself in visuals.
The
walls of Koppel's office are covered in interesting photos, words, and other
sources of inspiration.
"We
live in this world of vast imagery. I love looking at Google Images and I love
searching through imagery to inspire me. And that's a lot of what I do with my
work inside my office. My office is curated into these little ideas," he
says.
Use old objects for inspiration.
As
a creativity guru, Koppel's job is to help others tap their inner ingenuity.
One way he does it is by leaving interesting oddities around the office for discovery by curious
souls.
"If someone has a visual
problem that they need to solve sometimes [it helps to] look at an old comic
book, an old magazine, an old cookbook, and old Playboy that's in
braille," he says. "I want to create environments like a puzzle that
unlock the creativity that someone has by evoking some close relative of the
problem they need to solve."
Other things you might find in his
space: a Rubik's cube, Mad magazines, and a working Atari 2600.
Take
a walk in an interesting locale.
With a problem in the back of his
mind Koppel walks around Manhattan making free associations--mental connections
between seemingly unrelated things.
The idea for ScrollMotion actually
came from an old-fashioned 24-frame lenticular--one that uses a sequence of
images to create an animation--Koppel found in a store in 1997 during one such
walkabout.
"That was a very important
moment for me and by looking at that I was sort of able to get an idea of the
future," he says. "There are clues all around us to the problems that
we need to solve and sometimes it's just about being open to those clues and
thinking about them in a flexible way."
Use
children as a litmus test.
After creating apps for "Sesame
Street" and Disney, ScrollMotion ended up using kid-friendly functions
such as puzzles and drawing in apps for manufacturing and pharmaceutical
companies.
"All that stuff that we built
actually had applications for these other types of more professional ideas and
it was the fact that we had built them early on for kids that allowed us to
think much more creatively about these problems that we had to solve," he
says.
Koppel also like to bounce ideas off
kids because of their honesty.
"Often I tell my ideas to
children before I tell them to adults because I feel like children are absolutely
fearless and they have no remorse to tell you that something sucks,"
Koppel says. "Not only will they tell me instantly visually by the way
they act if it's good or not but if you can entertain a child then you're
pretty sure you can entertain an adult."
BY Christina
DesMarais http://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/5-ways-to-spark-your-creativity.html?cid=em01020week10d
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