Randomness as Inspiration

A few months ago, our Design Director, Alissa, led the team in a brainstorming activity. Although she announced the topic (creating a lesson planner), we were given instructions not to focus on that as our jumping off point. Instead, for our jumping off point, each group of two to three people chose a random word from the dictionary.*

Our words, as could be expected, ranged from "spaghetti" to "shopping" to "flamingo," and we began discussing what the words meant to us, how we used them or thought of them, and eventually, we worked our way toward the lesson planner. How was shopping like planning a lesson? What words described spaghetti? Why was a perfect lesson planner like a flock of flamingos in the classroom?

I thought of this activity today when reading about how scientists are creating their own form of Facebook, to network and exchange ideas. Alissa taught us how to take any idea, and use it to boost creativity and come up with outside-the-box solutions to basic problems, such as "how to create the perfect lesson planner." In the same way, these scientists took a basic problem "how to network" and connected it in an outside-the-box manner, to a social network. And apparently, this was the best way to do it!

Read more about Facebook-For-Scientists here: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hO2QW0gdAmYGxyNvqbA2qf...

*To randomize the words, Alissa asked us each to choose two numbers. The first number was the page she went to, and the second was the number of words she counted before choosing the word for the activity.