Insight check 15: Creative Thinking Footholds
Dec 16, 2024 7:21 pm
Insight check
A sometimes weekly email about decision-making, strategy, games and other observations.
We are making a thing.
But first, a journey to the centre of creativity.
Mr Squiggle was a man from the moon with blue hair and a pencil as a nose. He was the main character puppet on the eponymous Australian Children’s TV show that ran for 40 years from when my parents were children until my childhood.
He would ask the human on the show to draw a few random lines and shapes on the page for him to create a drawing from. He furiously attacked the page with his pencil nose, taking those few simple lines and turning them into something else.
Sometimes, the finished picture was upside down, allowing the host to reveal the drawing by turning it upright, to everybody's delight.
I played the game of Mr Squiggle with my mum for hours. I played it in uni when I should have been listening to lectures. I plan on playing it with my daughter. There is a vital lesson to learn about creative thinking here.
Creativity is best when not starting on a blank canvas. It needs handholds, something to seed and extrapolate on.
Mr Squiggle knew this in his infinite wisdom.
Other creative geniuses have figured this out and how to game it.
Brian Eno (Roxy music, music producer, etc) had a famous tool to jump-start creativity when required. The deck of oblique strategies was simple prompts on flash cards such as “Gardening, not architecture” and “Not building a wall, making a brick”.
The genius of the ambiguity was just to give creativity enough of a crack to get a purchase in your brain.
I have always loved this idea of using simple tools to give your brain little grabs in the right direction. So we are making a thing for it in our space.
The Idea
A card deck of footholds for good strategic thinking and decision-making.
The intended use
To be reached for when asking hard questions or approaching problems without a clear or easy strategy.
The design journey so far.
When making a game, I usually start by thinking about what vibe to imbue. These cards should be simple in form and use, but modularity should evoke cerebral complexity and expansiveness when considering the possibility of combinations. Other products that came to mind were old analogue synthesisers, keyboards and subway maps. Things with a few settings, dials, keys, and stops but, when combined, form infinite possibilities.
From here, an aesthetic grew with retro tech/subway colourways, simple abstracted maps, and functional symbols.
We wanted a central deck of tried and tested strategic thinking tools with clear instructions and several themed decks of foothold prompts. This resulted in a rabbit hole of months of research, writing and revisions.
Leading to many hours of edits.
Colourway options
A side-track down abstractional representation.
To a nearly finished concept that we really liked.
So what we have now is a fully modular deck of 28 main strategic tools that are simplified in steps and color mapped to the prompt decks that would be suggested/useful in each step.
The prompt decks contain upwards of 50 cards and are standalone products in their own right.
We will be packaging these in a box set with a recipe book for other valuable combinations of footholds.
This is a long-winded walk to let you know we will drop a physical product in the future. It is going to be beautiful, modular, and rad.
The box is going to be hefty, and it is going to be a must-have for anyone who likes card decks or structured functional exercises, as well as running strategic team meetings or critical thinking sessions.
We have put a heap of effort into this and have gone down a rabbit hole, and it will all be worth it if one person tells us one day that it helped them make a hard decision 1% easier.
Keep up on our socials or email list to be in the know. It will be coming in 2025.
The holidays are nearly here; if anyone wants to get me a Mr Squiggle Original to hang in my office or a 1st ed set of Oblique Strategies, I will be forever yours.
Dr Dan
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