
The book is
Applied Imagination by Alex F Osborn. If you want to buy a personal copy at a Amazon used bookstore of equivalent store. My copy was copyrighted in 1963.
Osborn calls using questions for creativity as
Questions as spurs to ideation.
Osborn says, “Questions can be used fruitfully in the pre-processing of a problem for brainstorming. Take the question of how to make a better car. This is too general for efficient attack. To narrow our target, we might ask questions like ‘what to add to a car?…..what to eliminate? etc.”
Osborn adds some general categories of questions to ask
- By way of adaptation?
- modification?
- substitution?
- addition?
- multiplication?
- subtraction?
- division?
- rearrangement?
- reversal?
- division?
- combination?
with various examples. For creativity practice the principles of including these type of questions is essential. For me, the
use of questions has to be the main tool in anyone’s
creativity tool bag
For
excellent software that includes, among other creativity

tools these categories of questioning, see
Thought Office, especially
eXpertExpander Plugin Module Thought Office offer many creativity at their home page. It is well worth

checking out. Santa (well actually our middle son Darren) brought me Some Thought Office software for Christmas 2009. Thanks, son,
Alex F. Osborn at Wikipedia
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