One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to be more creative and one way I’m doing that is picking creativity exercises from the brilliant book Caffeine for the Creative Mind: 250 exercises to wake up your brain.
Here’s last month’s challenge:
How Big is a Bread Basket?
Recognising relative size or distance is an underrated skill. The late Chick Hearn, long-time play-by-play broadcaster for Los Angeles Lakers, was the king at being able to identify, from a country mile away, how far any shot attempt was from the basket. Your task today is to find he Chick Hearn in you. Grab a digital camera and take one picture of an object that satisfies specific size criteria:
1 is bigger than a coffee cup, but smaller than a dinner plate
I chose to think of this in terms of the diameter of the seed head – if you include the petals I think this would be bigger than most dinner plates!
2 is smaller than a cat but bigger than a kitten
An adult sized ceramic clog – in wonderful Delft blue
3 is bigger than a baseball but smaller than a football
A sculpture of a child’s head from the Allard Pearson Museum.
(Just how big is a football?)
4 is smaller than a car, but bigger than a bicycle
A boat! This image fools the eye because the perspective makes the bike look bigger than the boat and the boat look bigger than the car.
5 is bigger than a letter but smaller than a folio
A bar of Chocolate. It’s a slight cheat – it’s bigger than a letter, we’ll be taste-testing this today.
Did this exercise break out the creativity?
Sort of – I started out with specific things in mind to look for, and dipped into my image library for a couple of them. The last one was actually the first that I took. This could easily be adapted as a break out exercise for a longer workshop, and allowing the use of existing image libraries could make it work for a virtual audience. Maybe you could use your company’s products for the size limits. It was fun to do but not super creative for me.
Change Meme 