Creativity can be developed through constant training. There are many creativity seminars held out there. These seminars will tell you the ways of improving the ability to generate new ideas and concepts. Lateral thinking is one of the creative approaches to come up with good and effective solutions to the problems faced.
I can say that most people, if not everyone, are very creative when they are young. The matter is whether a person grow out of exercising their creativity. If you give a cardboard box to a child, he'll shape, bend or cut it to form an imaginary space helmet, or a car, even a playhouse, and many other forms to entertain himself. However, as unfortunate as it is, rules in a household, school, workplace, society and such; causes a person to grow up being limited in what he can do. Commands like, "No, you can't do this. Do that instead" or ,"This is not allowed. Go do this and that instead" in various stages of a person's life lead to the fear of doing something wrong. Thus, he'll do what is deemed as right and is scared to cross the invisible lines around him.
Different people are inspired by using different ways. Some people sit around looking at various people going on with their own lives. Sometimes, you get to learn something new or unexpected from good observation skills. As said during the lecture, some people gets new ideas by playing with images, shuffling or combining; just looking at different images and discovering new ways to improve a concept. Besides, an effective way is to ask yourself, "What if...?". New perspectives in looking at a problem can lead to more possibilities in dealing with them. Not only that, writing down ideas and brainstorm without judging any of the ideas that pop into mind help in generating a large quantity of ideas. Then, you can go through each of them and pick out the good ones. I myself sometimes discover new ways to carry out a certain main idea in the list, when i see another at the bottom of the list that can be used to complement the main one. As things can go different ways, depending on how it is approached, a variety of solutions can be formed.
On the other hand, existing ideas can also be reshuffled, modified, and combined to improve the original and present it in a new way. A lot of great works are inspired by an existing piece of art, which might also be inspired by another piece of original creation.
One of the fun ways to train is by setting your music player on random and doodle what comes into your mind for the duration of each song and stop whenever a song ends. This and many other kinds of mind training can help one to be able to generate ideas more easily.
Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk that was shared in class.
Another enlightening talk by Brian Tracy
Creative Image of your friend – please scan and put it in the blog with descriptions, expressions, experiences, etc. Send this image to your friend. Use the creative image your friend has done of you as your avatar/photo of you in the blog
this is a cartoon representation of Chathra. The colour scheme is one that he likes. The linked thoughts from his head shows how he's always thinking. The drawing shows him supporting his head with arms and then leg plus eyebrows furrowed to show him deep in thought
