You’re often told that to think creatively you need to “think outside the box”. But why’s that? Well, imagine this box represents the way that you’ve always solved problems.
And because this is the box that you operate in your solutions are always going to look kinda similar.
The box that you’ve been thinking in might have worked just fine many times before but one day it doesn’t and you find that you can’t think yourself out of this new problem.
So when you get stuck in a rut like this people will often tell you that you need to think outside the box… But I’m not so sure that this actually works!
If you’ve got no box to think in then how will your thoughts and ideas even take shape or be moulded into some sort of useful solution? Think of it like pouring cement into outer space… You’re not going to have any boundaries that allow the cement to form into something useful and instead you give up, and revert to what you were using before.
So maybe a better way to think of being creative is to think in new boxes. Boxes that have different shapes are going to give you different solutions that you can test out or maybe even combine and hopefully give you a better way of solving your problem then your old box.
Artists and designers often consciously or unconsciously create new boxes for themselves that limit the possibilities of a single solution. But then, by using lots of different boxes they get lots of really different solutions. Sometimes they even combine the boxes to create a truly unique solution!
Product designers, in particular, have a bunch of boxes that they like to think in to help guide their creativity. Examples are:
- Limiting the time they have to create something.
- Trying to come up with the worst possible idea and reversing it OR embracing it!
- Drawing ideas as a comic strip rather than trying to just talk about them
Discover some more of these boxes or design thinking tools as they are more popularly know with this cool toolbox from IDEO or check out the awesome book Designing Your Life to see how you can apply design thinking to your career.
