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Academic Standardization of Creative thinking methods

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Samuel Bello

Samuel Bello Jul 27, 2021

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Logical thinking principles have been getting evolved and standardized for a very long time. These advanced logical principles have helped humanity formulate theories and make a lot of technological advancements. Most of these advancements were possible because we did not have to derive a lot of things from the first principles. Just like Logical conclusions have been passed down for many generations, creative thinking methods should also be recorded and passed down in an organized way. By keeping a well-organized database of creative thoughts and patterns, the collective creativity of the human race will increase dramatically.
An advantage that creative thinking methods have over logical methods is that they can be used across disciplines with lesser restrictions.
One of the reasons our creative thinking knowledge system will grow rapidly is because creative thinking is possible by people in all age groups and fewer principles have to be learned before one can make novel contributions.
To create such a standard database, people have to become more aware of creative thinking patterns by thinking about how they think. Artificial Intelligence algorithms can be used to deduce possible creative patterns that were involved from the nature of the solutions arrived at.
When more than one solution method is applied, the inferior solutions should be recorded studied. Those solutions that are inefficient from a logical point of view may have creative novelties that can be of use in solving other problems. Simply put, we should also keep a database of bad ideas and constantly revisit them to generate new ideas.

database creativity data analysis

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Creative contributions

"Creative thinking" as a part of every course

Shubhankar Kulkarni

Shubhankar Kulkarni Jul 28, 2021

I like the idea, @Samuel Bello!

If there was a standardized list of the famous creative thinking methods (which we have, fortunately:), please check the contributions here, a course could be designed to teach these methods.

Also, every other course could be supplemented with relevant creative thinking methods. Every field requires creativity to further improve it. Along with the technical details that are used to teach a course or a skill, relevant creative thinking methods could help tremendously. They can be in the form of projects or group activities, games, etc. making them more enjoyable, practical, and application-oriented.

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Samuel Bello

Samuel Bello4 years ago

Take mathematics, for example, just like you would not expect a mathematics textbook to be a list of suggestions, terms, and their definitions like the one you referred me to, I expect to see a more organized system of principles where the more advanced methods could be derived from the basic principles. 

The brainstorming methods listed can help one come up with solutions to some types of problems. Figuring out the solutions to problems is just one area of creativity. What about the kind of creative thinking that can be applied to create more problems? The kind of creative thinking that painters, musicians, and comedians employ, where there are no specific problems to be solved and the quality of the end product can only be judged subjectively will need a system to be put in place before we can effectively standardize creative thinking methods.

These fields employ creative thinking in the most flexible form. They are less restricted by logical constraints and one can do the same thing in so many different ways and still be right. Creativity in such fields can sometimes be more tasking because logical thinking can not always tell us if we are on the right track unlike when we are solving science-based problems where we usually have our logical thinking and empirical data to guide us.

I agree with you that the creative thinking methods that are most relevant to one's discipline should be taught in those disciplines. It could be possible to develop creative thinking as a discipline where people can have college degrees in creative thinking methods.

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Regarding the AI, the database, the potentially changing nature of creative thinking inspirations and deriving deeper principles from them to make the course

salemandreus

salemandreus Aug 03, 2021

@Darko Savic posted a creative idea on a repository of stuff that is likely to spark novel ideas in people which seems to go very well with what you refer to as a database of "bad ideas"... except in this case it is a repository where we focus on learning from the good ideas. 

On one of his CCs he talks about learning from past ideas and I posted a comment there on some of the types of machine learning we could use for doing this at scale and to generate new trends and insights a human might not identify using Unsupervised Learning (Clustering) and Deep Learning.
Linking that here where I go more in-depth and also share some links on these types of machine learning , as it seems these ideas and solutions overlap very well.

The learning methods I go in depth about also would relate to not only identifying the ideas themselves, but identifying the patterns that link them, similarly to what you mentioned.

The best part of using unsupervised learning is it's not reliant on or constrained to an observer or trainer - trends are revealed through the clustering and deeper insights gained from the deep learning so we have actual concrete and unbiased data from the algorithm, which scales with big data.

I think then the main thing would be keeping an open mind regarding what we find, given the nature of creative thinking and how many of the specifics are likely to change with cultural trends (particularly with the pandemic's changes to societal systems), but through obtaining those deeper insights through the combination of both the deep learning and clustering ideally we would be able to derive the deeper guiding principles, which could then help us to formulate the basis of these creative thinking methods, or even a creative thinking course, as @Shubhankar Kulkarni mentioned.

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Add your creative contribution

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