Greetings guys. My name’s Oliver Meech and Andi asked me to make a guest post here on The Clog. He thought that this creativity idea would fit nicely in The Clog as it relates to his last post: Inspired by the News. So without further ado, here’s the idea:

OK, drumroll please. I’m about to let you in on a powerful creativity tool that can unleash a flood of new ideas. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … Wikipedia. No wait, come back, I’ll explain.

A classic technique of creativity is random word stimulation. In other words, you look up a random word in the dictionary and try and apply it to whatever you’re thinking about. It sounds weird but it works because it breaks you out of logical thinking and forces you to make new associations, which leads to original thinking.

The trouble is, some words like “the” are less useful than nouns like “strike”. Here’s where three useful features of Wikipedia come in:

1. It’s packed with more words than any physical dictionary.
2. Most of the entries are nouns.
3. And last but not least, it has link in the top left corner called “Random Article.”

Voila – an endless supply of random words (and often images) to stimulate your thinking.

Here’s a quick example. Say I want to come up with a close-up trick. I’ve just gone on to Wikipedia now and clicked the ‘Random Article’ link. It’s given me a city in Brazil called Cassilândia. Apparrently it’s famous for its rodeo party. Rodeo makes me think of the board game Buckaroo, where you gently hang objects on a horse’s saddle whilst trying to prevent the horse from springing up.

So how about you show off your sleight-of-hand by switching an object that’s balanced on the horse’s saddle without it springing up. What object? Well, how about a coin that you ’switch’ using a shell and a Raven, or a card which you switch using a double lift. There, one click and we’ve already got two new routines.

Now it’s your turn: click here for a random article, have a think and let us know what you come up with.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Creativity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.