On the 2nd of October 2012, DCU 1st years had their first mini-conference for the DICE module(Digital Innovation Creativity and Enterprise). The conference was held in the Helix and it was called “Get Creative”. This conference had a guest speaker named Nigel Newman, who wanted to encourage us to think creatively. This conference was all about how to get new ideas, manage and implement them. I found this conference very interesting of course. I found it reached some psychological depth and encouraged you to really think and come up with ideas.
The first half of the conference was all about how thinking happens. This really showed you the psychological side of thinking. I learned that “to see new things we may need help in leaving patterns and routines”. This means that trying new things is a great way to come up with new ideas. We must not get so used to doing the same thing all the time as this can be rather boring. People enjoy new, fresh ideas. They can be exciting and fun.
Nigel referred to a book that he says he says he carries around with him every day of his life, “Hare Brain Tortoise Mind”. The book refers to the two types of animals that are within our minds the hare and the tortoise. He explained to us that with a mind your mind represented by the hare means you are a fast thinker who does not carefully examine things before doing them, compared to the tortoise who is a slow, rational thinker that likes to take time when solving problems and be creative when doing it.There are two ways of thinking:
System 1 – Fast, intuitive, automatic thinking.
System 2 – Slow, rational, calculating thinking.
Nigel talked about the book “Six Thinking Hats” written by Edward de Bono. I found this rather clever and interesting. The six thinking hats is a tool for group discussion and individual thinking. They are used for creative thinking and to help come up with new ideas. The six thinking hats have different colours and different meanings.
White: Information
Red: Feelings and Emotion
Blue: Thinking about thinking
Green: Creativity
Black: Judgement
Yellow: Benefits
Nigel gave us a group task. We were given the statement “All cars must be painted yellow by law”. We had to come up with advantages and disadvantages to this idea. We took on board how people would feel about this concept if it was brought in and gave our own opinions on the idea. We came up with more disadvantages than advantages for this idea. I found this task really made you think about the world and how ideas can impact the world in a huge way.
The second half of the conference was all about the different ways on how to be creative, and doing things with the ideas you have come up with. This showed us the business side of thinking. I found this part of the conference very beneficial and exciting. This helped me to come up with new ideas and to share them with my team at the conference. Nigel brought up the example of Art Fry, who worked for the company 3M. He created glue that did not stick. Instead of discarding the glue, the company looked at it using the six thinking hats method and in turn created the post-it. This is an inspiring idea and made me think that the six thinking hats could be very useful after all.
Nigel then got us to do get into pairs. This task was called “Combination Thinking”. Each of us had to think of a useful object and then try to combine it together. This was to show your creative and enterprise side. This was my favourite task that we had to do. I found it fun and useful. It allowed us to get thinking of ideas that could possibly be used one day for business. We used a brainstorming technique to generate creative ideas for a product.
Towards the end, Nigel introduced the “Rules of Simplicity”. These include:
Remove – an aspect to improve.
Replace – maintain or increase.
Restructure – the delivery of value.
Finally, Nigel gave us some advice on what to do with our ideas. I learned that it is important to share and exchange ideas with people, to nurture them and to make a plan for your ideas. TEAM is key for ideas.
T – Time (find)
E – Enthusiam (generate)
A – Attitude (change)
M – Model
I found this conference very useful and enjoyable. I realised how important thinking and creativity is. Creative ideas can make an impact on the world. If you really put your mind to something, you can generate brilliant ideas. These ideas are the futute.
DICE 