Forced connections

pagecreatediverge

Manufacture a creative collision.

Variants

• default

Data fields

The fields a spec's page can set for this component (see switchback show forced-connections --json):

• words
• subject

Grounding

Helps: when ideas have gone stale and familiar; outside stimuli can lift idea output, but random words themselves are untested, so treat each connection as a prompt to test, not a finding

Backfires: when a stimulus fixes attention on itself instead of widening it, as provided examples do in design studies, and during convergence, where unrelated input is noise

• DExposure to randomly selected stimuli (words or prompts unrelated to the problem) during idea generation increases the number and originality of ideas, compared with generating without stimuli.Dugosh et al. (2000), Vasconcelos & Crilly (2016), Leahy et al. (2020), Jansson & Smith (1991)
• DDeliberately combining two distant concepts produces more original ideas than working from a single concept, with originality driven by attributes that emerge from the combination.Koestler (1964), The Act of Creation

What the grades mean