Outside My Box- The Creative Power of Non-Linear Thinking

This solution is to create a simple mind mapping game that would allow a young person to drag and drop words or tagged images or quotes into a virtual box, and then have that data free associated across the web.

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Written by Kenneth Walton

07:25, Nov 04, 2013

MyBox Concept Diagram

Mind Map

Synapse Randomly fire while sleeping merged ideas

Babies Learn while Sleeping

Comparison Chart

Students are always encouraged to think outside of the box when problem solving, but once the box has been created in your mind it is difficult to move on to another idea. This is especially hard when you think the first idea is pretty good, and you have had limited exposure to the problem. This solution is to create a simple mind mapping game that would allow a young person to drag and drop words or tagged images or quotes into a virtual box, and then have that data free associated across the web. The output from this search would yield a series of clusters of related and unrelated nodes with a central “Big Idea” surrounded by Related Inspirations.

In this challenge, we want to create ideas with young people, not for them. Outline how you’re planning to involve young people or other end-users (parents, teachers, etc) in designing, iterating or testing your idea during the Ideas phase.

A simple approach would be to create card game with a group if images on the front and the invention on the back, this flash card game approach could easily be added to by students, teachers or parents. A web based game could also be mocked-up in Flash or HTML 5. A web survey could be created to accompany the prototype on the website; along with an annotation tool to allow testers to add feedback and help to develop the tool. The feedback tool could be a game in itself allowing the users to add design image inspirations to inventions they know. Testers could be awarded with developer credit.

How might you envision your idea spreading across geographies or cultures so that it inspires young people around the world to cultivate their creative confidence?

Games are incredibility addictive, I would take advantage of social media Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Four Square and others, and game blogs to get the game out to the world population.

What skills, input or guidance would you like to receive from the OpenIDEO community to help you build out or refine your idea further?

It would be great to get input from game developers and story tellers to improve upon the concept and offer strategy advice for game play. Any programming and graphic advice would be helpful as well.

Written by

Kenneth Walton

Architect