Tuesday, February 23, 2010

What is a great book full of questions to stimulate creativity?

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