Creativity Activities Creativity is divided into five different categories: fluency, flexibility, redefinition, originality, and elaboration. On this page you will find an explanation of each along with some creative problems for you to try. At the end of this page you will have the opportunity to participate in the Creativity Challenge. Be sure to check out the Creativity Challenge below! Creativity Menu What is Fluency in Creativity? The ability to think well and effortlessly in order to generate a quantity of ideas, responses, solutions, or questions. Fluency Problems List all the things you can think of that are blue or have the word “blue” in them. Creativity Challenge Are you interested in the Creativity Challenge? (Back to Top Menu) What is Flexibility in Creativity? The ability to easily abandon old ways of thinking, adopt new ones, and produce ideas, responses, questions, or solutions in a variety of categories. Flexibility Problems What are other uses for a napkin? What is Redefinition in Creativity? Rules
How to Build a Collective Intelligence Platform to Crowdsource Almost Anything Introduction The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence recently published an important overview of the theory and mechanisms behind successful crowdsourcing efforts. Their report, called “Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence“, can be found here. Their research reveals similarities behind many high-profile collective intelligence (CI) systems, including Threadless, Wikipedia and InnoCentive. It then describes how these lesson can be applied to the design of other successful CI platforms. I call this work the MIT Approach to Collective Intelligence, which is a generic approach applicable to a wide range of problems and circumstances. The MIT approach to collective intelligence According to the Center for Collective Intelligence, a good collective intelligence platform (CI) must address the following themes: These four themes then translate into the following four questions: What is to be accomplished? Figure 1, the basic building blocks of a CI system Conclusion
Catalyst - An Intuit Innovation Experience Why Being Sleepy and Drunk Are Great for Creativity | Wired Science Here’s a brain teaser: Your task is to move a single line so that the false arithmetic statement below becomes true. Did you get it? In this case, the solution is rather obvious – you should move the first “I” to the right side of the “V,” so that the statement now reads: VI = III + III. Here’s a much more challenging equation to fix: In this case, only 43 percent of normal subjects were able to solve the problem. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should take a hammer to your frontal lobes. This helps explain a new study led by Mareike Wieth at Albion College. A man has married 20 women in a small town. And here’s another classic puzzle: Marsha and Marjorie were born on the same day of the same month of the same year to the same mother and the same father, yet they are not twins. Did you solve these brain teasers? The other half of the problems given to the students were standard analytic problems, such as long-division and pre-algebra equations. Cracker Union Rabbit
Michael Meade, D.H.L.: The Two Great Stories of the World Recently, I have been on panels where people lament how the troubles of the world seem increasingly intractable. I've heard environmentalists suggest that evolution may have reached a dead end with regard to the human species. I've heard pained audiences decry political parties as well as social movements. I have found myself responding with ancient proverbs such as: "The great person allows universal imagination to work through them." It's as if something quite old and truly resilient is required to face the dire array of modern problems, for most of modern life is arranged to take us away from ourselves. Not just from advertising suggesting that what we lack can be purchased, nor from the ever-growing number of clever distractions, but we also learn to abandon ourselves amidst expectations that the answers to crucial problems and solutions to great dilemmas must come from the world outside us. The answers that sustain life and reveal meaning amidst the confusion come from within.
Presentation Software for Mac and iPad Test Your Creativity: 5 Classic Creative Challenges Fascinated by how brains and creativity work, we frequently share new research on the 99U twitter feed, showing how everything from drinking alcohol, to taking vacations, to moving your eyes from side to side can make you more creative. What’s particularly interesting, however, is that most of these studies rely on just a small group of core creativity tests – and you don’t need any special lab equipment to take them. Below, we’ve collected five of the most commonly used creativity challenges for your self-testing pleasure. While creativity “testing” is far from an exact science, trying your mettle at these challenges could yield insight into when, where, and how you’re most creative. Or maybe it’ll just be fun. 1. Developed by J.P. Hold papers togetherCufflinksEarringsImitation mini-tromboneThing you use to push that emergency restart button on your routerKeeping headphones from getting tangled upBookmark The test measures divergent thinking across four sub-categories: 2. 3. 4. 5.
Social entrepreneurs go Hollywood: The promise of change in 25 words or less (It’s pretty hard to change the world, if no one wants to follow your thinking…) Curtis Faith has been asking us all about stories. What is your story? Who is the hero? How will it end? Good questions, because stories provide a powerful framework for spreading ideas. Randy Olson, the scientist-turned-filmmaker, regularly lambastes the academic/science community for getting so caught up in the pointy-headed details that they completely forget how real communication happens. Also take a look at the work by Alex (Sandy) Petland, the author of Honest Signals. Yet most scientists (and other big idea people) don’t get it. The thing is, if you want to move your idea from the edge into the mainstream, from the future to the present, you have to package it. This is not the same thing as dumbing it down. That’s why, especially for the “issue entrepreneurs”, stories are the key to changing the world… And no one is better at telling stories (that move a big audiences) than Hollywood. Hollywood Story:
The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek and The Daily Beast Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers. In fact, the psychologist’s session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25 improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. The potential consequences are sweeping. Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated.
» Best Procrastination Tip Ever :zen habits Post written by Leo Babauta. Your first thought as you look at this article will be, “I’ll read this later.” But don’t. Let the urge to switch to a new task pass. Read this now. It’ll take you two minutes. I’ve written the book on ending procrastination, but I’ve since come up with a very simple technique for beating everyone’s favorite nemesis. Try it now: Identify the most important thing you have to do today. Clear away distractions. Sit there, and focus on getting started. Pay attention to your mind, as it starts to have urges to switch to another task. But don’t move. Notice also your mind trying to justify not doing the task. Now just take one small action to get started. Get started, and the rest will flow.
How Creative Are You? The man nicknamed “the father of creativity” was psychologist E. Paul Torrance. In the 1940s he began researching creativity in order to improve American education. In order to encourage creativity, we needed to define it — to measure and analyze it. We measured intelligence with an IQ score; why not measure creativity? Torrance drew on contemporary research that related creativity to divergent thinking — the characteristic of coming up with more answers, or more original answers, rather than deriving a single best answer. But there’s a problem.