Card #3 – ”Get out of Your Box”

Card #3 – ”Get out of Your Box” from the Creative Whack Pack

Available on the iOS App Store and as a physical deck of cards

Journalist Bob Wieder:
Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport.”

Often the best ideas come from cutting across disciplinary boundaries and looking into other fields.

For example, World War I military designers borrowed from the Cubist art of Picasso to create more efficient camouflage patterns for tanks.

Physicist Albert Einstein applied the non-Euclidean geometry of 19th century mathematician Georg Riemann to represent his four-dimensional map of light.

Data base developer Erik Lumer created a more flexible custom-profiling system for the banking industry by studying how worker ants cluster their dead when cleaning their nests.

I’ve known songwriters who got inspiration from listening to crowd chants at basketball games, venture capitalists who spotted new opportunities by going to junkyards, educators who got ideas by going to prisons, advertising people who borrowed ideas from biology, and software programmers who were influenced by songwriters.

— What fields and disciplines might you borrow from?

— What potentially fertile sources have you been ignoring?

— Think of a color. Now think of two places often associated with that color. What ideas could you get if you went to these places?

— What useful information might you find in the following places?

• A hardware store?

• In a church?

• An operating room?

• A cruise ship?

• A junkyard?

• At an amusement park?

• At a glacier?

• A convention of Elvis   impersonators?

• At a laboratory?

• At a rodeo?

• In a large grocery store?

• At a yodeling contest?

• The children’s section of a   bookstore?

• At a cancer ward?

• At a parking garage?

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