Visual analogies-http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/Visanal/start.htm
Visual Analogies-A Creative Communication Option
Visual Analogies http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutorials/process/visualanalogy/visanalogy.htm#top
Since creativity involves the coordination or building of things into new structures, every creative thought or action draws on synectic thinking.
Any new idea builds on an old idea so
Being creative is bringing different things together in a new way, which is synectic thinking
Synectic thinking is the process of discovering the links that unite seemingly disconnected elements.
A man was walking through a field and got a burr caught in his sock. He looked at the burr under the microscope and noticed the plant had a hook that looped around the sock fibers. He combined the idea of the hook with a fiber it could capture and invented Velcro. That’s synectic thinking. Two disconnected ideas merge to become a new idea.
http://members.optusnet.com.au/charles57/Creative/Techniques/synectics.htm
Another person looked at the way leaves fell together in a pile invented Pringles potato chips.
Analogy: A cat is like refrigerator in that they both can be white, have milk in the body and purr.
Metaphor: Children are flowers that you watch bloom.
What could you use a bee to represent?
What is a rose like?
What do the song lyrics mean when they say: My love is like a red, red rose?
Make something strange familiar… How could you do that?
Create something new…
Personal analogies-do you feel like a sponge, doormat? Do you see yourself as a lion, a mouse?
Direct analogies-A school is like a salad…life is like an elevator.
Conflicting analogies…War-creative and destructive. Talent is a blessing and a curse.
A metaphor is a soft thinking technique connecting two different universes of meaning.
Examples: Food chain, flow of time, fiscal watchdog.
The key to metaphorical thinking is similarity. The human mind tends to look for similarities.
It’s like looking at the family picture and trying to see who has Grandma’s eyes or who has Daddy’s eyes.
A road map is a model or metaphor of reality and useful for explaining things, the Dolby Sound system is like a sonic laundry.
http://members.optusnet.com.au/charles57/Creative/Techniques/synectics
Picture from http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/domes/
Bucky was the person most responsible for making Synergy a common term. Much of his work was about exploring and creating synergy. He found synergy to be a basic principle of all interactive systems. He developed a subject called Synergetics, a "Geometry of Thinking".
Fuller is the inventor of the Geodesic dome, and was a pioneer in utilizing basic geometrical shapes in design.
http://members.optusnet.com.au/charles57/Creative/Techniques/synectics.htm
To develop a synectic attitude, you really need to let your mind wonder.
http://members.optusnet.com.au/charles57/Creative/Techniques/synectics.htm
To really get into synectic thinking you have to develop your playful side.
http://members.optusnet.com.au/charles57/Creative/Techniques/synectics.htm
If you let your mind wonder through the synectic trigger mechanisms, new thoughts will be created.
Here are the 23 synectic triggers. Let’s imagine using several of them to trigger a new idea.
For example: Lets think of a frog. Now in your mind, animate the frog, make him jump. Now change the frog’s scale and make him jump some more…what does this new size do for the frog. Is the frog still the same loveable little creature? That’s synectic thinking.
This is a proposed way to use the synectic triggers to transform your thinking.
So a committee could create synergy which is a form of energy.
Picture from http://www.eskimo.com/~recall/bleed/images/babymax.jpg
Max Ernst – Dada artist
You can see that Ernst has used the very familiar Eagle to lead you into his very unfamiliar world.
