Overview of Article:

Thoughts on this article: Where to begin…I found this to be interesting based on the core understanding that Design Thinking utilizes both left and right brain approaches to create and solve.  usually, we are talking about different people with each of these traits, not individuals that have the ability to “shift” between the two.  However, there are still times that I work with a group that could use a boost of creativity in their thoughts…so maybe I will give this a try!

Original Article HERE at NewsWeek.com

When Is a Brick Not a Brick?

What can a brick be used for? Well, there’s building a house, breaking a window, holding down a pile of papers on a windy day, squashing a bug, paving a driveway, building a wall, as the legs of a small table … Now take a break and shift your eyes from left to right and back again for 30 seconds.

If psychologist Elizabeth Shobe of Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and her colleagues are right, that ocular exercise spurred creative thinking, enabling you to come up with yet more uses for a brick (perhaps putting in the toilet tank to reduce water usage? how about as a mock coffin at a Barbie funeral?). (Click here to follow Sharon Begley).

There is no shortage of self-appointed experts on creativity (a quick search for ways to increase it turns up “clear your workspace” and “act on your instincts“). The snake-oil approaches are unfortunate, because there is pretty decent neuroscientific research on the brain basis for creativity, as I wrote about a few years back. Above all, the studies show that creativity is not just a personality trait (and thus hard to change) but also a trainable skill.

Some of the most interesting work, for instance, has shown that an approach called psychological distancing can boost creativity. In psychological distancing, you construe a problem as not occurring to you in the here-and-now, as this Scientific Americanstory explains.

Also helpful to creativity is anything that increases cross talk between the brain’s left and right hemispheres.

That’s where shifty eyes come in.

In a paper to be published next month in Brain and Cognition, Shobe and her team note that earlier studies had suggested that cross talk between the brain’s hemispheres is important, and maybe even necessary, for creativity.

Patients who have undergone surgery to sever the bundle of neurons (called the corpus callosum) that connects the two hemispheres (sometimes done to stop epileptic seizures) come up short on standard tests of creativity, such as the brick puzzle.

It was also known that people with strong handedness—that is, they do absolutely everything with the left or right hand, and are all thumbs when they try to use the other hand—have less cross talk between their brain hemispheres than do people who are ambidextrous or “mixed handed,” in which they are able to use the nonfavored hand for some tasks.

But it wasn’t clear whether increasing hemispheric cross talk could increase creativity.

The scientists therefore had 62 volunteers take the “alternative uses test,” in which the goal is to think of unusual uses for common objects, such as bricks and newspapers. “Mixed-handers,” who have more hemispheric cross talk than strong left- or right-handers, came up with more unique uses for the objects than did strong left- or right-handers, supporting the idea that hemispheric cross talk boosts creativity.

Half of the volunteers then spent 30 seconds doing the shifty-eye exercise, moving their eyes back and forth horizontally, which is believed to increase communication between the brain’s hemispheres. The other half stared straight ahead for 30 seconds. Then everyone took the test again.

Obviously there should be some effect of experience. That is, on a second try, people should think of more unusual uses for bricks and the like, even when they are given different objects to think about. Most people did.

But the volunteers who had performed the eye-shifting exercise and who were strongly left- or right-handed showed a significant improvement in creativity as measured by how many uses they came up with, which no one else did; their performance now matched that of the mixed-handers. Staring straight ahead, in contrast, had no effect on creativity.

And performing the eye-shifting exercise did not boost the already-higher creativity of the mixed-handers, suggesting that they already had an optimal level of hemispheric cross talk.

“The results suggest that greater inter-hemispheric interaction can facilitate creativity of strong-handers,” the scientists conclude, “but that the characteristically higher inter-hemispheric interaction of mixed-handers was unaffected by the” eye exercise.

Dreaming up uses for bricks and newspapers is not exactly on a par with, say, inventing cubism or atonal music. But it’s the kind of exercise that life coaches and business-creativity consultants employ to get clients’ creative juices flowing.

Can shifting your eyes back and forth for 30 seconds boost creativity in a meaningful way—that is, not on a psych test, but in the real world?

I’m dubious that it can inspire someone to write the Great American Novel, but—who knows?—it might just get employees to come up with that killer brand extension.

To me, though, the more interesting implication of the research is less in providing a how-to-boost-creativity exercise than in shedding light on where creativity comes from in the first place. The shifting-eyes study is yet more evidence that people dream up unique and unusual ideas by fitting together disparate bits of information, some of it handled by the right brain and some of it handled by the left.

That suggests that when you are trying to solve a problem—and by “problem” I mean anything from a new ad campaign to an effective compromise in a political battle to a new product design—it might help to go offline, mentally. That is, rather than fixating on the question (typically, a left-brain activity), let your thoughts wander, which might engage the right brain.

Indeed, there is intriguing research that having a “leaky” mental filter, so that thoughts that are seemingly irrelevant to the problem at hand penetrate your consciousness, boosts creativity. But if all else fails, the shifty-eye thing might not be a bad start.

Sharon Begley is NEWSWEEK’s science editor and author of The Plastic Mind: New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves and Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves.

Thoughts on Post: I always like to see how people are able to apply the Design Thinking concepts and principles to their work.  Helene gives a good breakdown of the process, but also show the continued “grayness” of defining the difference of Design Thinking and Human Centered Design and User Experience.

Original Post at Creative Problem Solving Institute website

Posted by: Helene Cahen

Design Thinking is best defined as applying the principles and mind-sets used by designers and architects, in other fields that require innovation. Non-designers can learn to use and apply the mind-sets and process to those challenges that require innovation. Design Thinking presents a creative problem solving approach that is somewhat similar to CPS, but focuses on areas that CPS does not fully articulate given its origin in the design world. In the past couple of years, I have integrated design thinking not only into my consulting business practice (I do training and facilitation around innovation) but also as a different way of thinking. Here are the three mind-sets that have made the deepest impact for me.

Being human-centered
My background is in Marketing Research. While consumer needs have always been important to me when working on new product related projects, the human-centered principle takes this idea much further and requires me to remember all those people that may be affected by the changes throughout the process, whether I am working on a product, a service, a training program or for a non-profit. The mind-set of being human-centered with a focus on empathy has impacted the way I work on projects. I now start with an observation and/or interview phase first. When facilitating creative projects, I suggest that the participants learn more about the product or service in an experiential way in addition to the traditional secondary research, talk to customers or users and observe people. For instance, if the project is about a consumer product, participants may watch people using a product; if the project is related to manufacturing, participants may visit a plant, observe how the products are made and talk to the employees; if the project is a non profit project, participants may talk to the customers or spend time observing at the place where the services are delivered. In my personal life, while writing my master project, which focused on design thinking, I interviewed designers and scholars, and then created a Google group with experts, scholars and people interested in the topic, where many conversations helped me articulate my project.

Visual Thinking
This is perhaps the most challenging concept for me since words are my most natural way of expressing myself. Despite extensive studies in business and creativity, I used very little in the way of incorporating visuals and visual thinking. Very few of my peers or mentors have been using visuals in their presentation. In addition, I had to overcome my personal belief that since I cannot draw any better than a five year-old, I should not use visuals to communicate with others, or even when I was thinking for myself. Arnheim, a Harvard professor in Psychology of Art explains that drawings serve as an “aid in the process of working solutions to a problem” (Visual Thinking p.129). In the past few years I have been challenging myself to use visuals and drawings in my presentations, to use mind mapping for taking notes or organizing my thoughts, and to encourage people to draw in my training or facilitation sessions. I found out that drawing is a powerful problem-solving tool and it has helped me find solutions that I had in my mind but was not able to put in words. For instance when I draw a model for integrating Design Thinking and CPS, it became obvious to me that Design Thinking is a more open model than the traditional circular CPS model, and that the combined model needed to look open to the outside influences.

Adopting a prototyping attitude
This again requires a mind-shift, as the prototyping attitude compels you to ask yourself: how to create a small version of the solution to try and evaluate it quickly and cheaply? Tom Kelley said “prototyping is problem solving…. What counts is moving the ball forward, achieving part of the goal” (Art of innovation, p. 103). A prototyping attitude means that when I am facilitating a group and we are developing solutions, we start making fast prototypes (by fast I mean done in 10 minutes) which help tremendously with narrowing down options, getting group buy-in and equally important, selling to management. In a creative session I facilitated recently, I had the group representing their different solutions using play-doh and it really helped the group to get specific about their feasibility discussion. A prototyping attitude also means trying solutions in the real world on a very small scale to get feedback, while saving time and money. When one of my clients was considering opening a new business in San Francisco, I encouraged him to try a small scale project first, using his current structure and an informal partnership agreement, rather than creating a partnership venture that would involve legal costs and capital investment.

For me Design Thinking is a perfect complement to CPS, as it brings more attention to an external focus based on the principles of being human-centered, adds visual thinking and prototyping as a complement to words, and helps with the action portion of CPS by offering an outcome that is easier to sell because it is tested prototype(s), rather than a solution on paper.