Here are just 10 additional approaches I use to stimulate my own creative juices.

(1) Think of a color and try to identify all the shades and tints on that hue in your surroundings. Identify everything that is yellow; robins egg blue; teal; orange.
(2) Look at objects from antiquity and think about how their form worked to support an activity and how its design evolved over time. A museum of natural history is great for this.
(3) Look for textures and patterns on various surfaces; paint peeling from an old truck; faces forming in stucco; swirls of oil on a puddle of water.
(4) Go bird watching. I kid you not. Birds often have gorgeous colors (the shimmering green of a Mallard,for example).
(5) Take 15 minutes and make quick, 1 min sketches of anything that comes into your field of vision. Save these for later and flip through them, turn them upside down, sideways, and look at them in a mirror. Now embellish them by drawing crazy appendages. Or subtract sections to devise new shapes and forms.
(7) Look at wrist watches and watch magazines. Elegant, high end watches are often incredible in providing numerous functions in a small space. It’s little wonder that watch designers are invited to design instrument displays in cars. This can help in, say, designing a media player UI.
(8) Go to a mall and watch people interacting with the environment. Where are they looking? What are they responding to? What do they pick up and touch? What do they avoid? Where to they seem to talk most? Gather?
(9) Play a game like Bejeweled for about an hour. Look for patterns that yield the best result. Then look around you in the real world. Can you see, hear, smell, or feel any patterns?
(10) Examine any environment you are in look for what is rare. In a place like Vegas, try to identify organic forms amid the largely geometric shapes of structures. In a forest, look for rectilinear elements in an sea of organic forms.

Obviously, different things will work for different people. The list can be extended to infinity. Some of these seem silly and pointless, however I’m convinced any such exercises help dissolve creative impassess. The main point is to break away from the usual and do decidedly different things to stimulate new ideas.

-Vytas

Ultimately exposure to new places in the concrete world or different professions in the offline world simply applies polish to much more core traits, such as the relationship between pressure and developing a healthy sense of humour in order to reframe the mind, or treating mistakes as a gift rather than simply pursuing perfection - the going out therefore compliments the going in and the net result is releasing away tension, evaporating fear, allowing the mind to make connections with felt sense, with experential maturity and generally a feeling of wisdom and growth by observing life in new ways.

Earlier I took time to look at Peter Merholz’s photo’s from UX interactive and just looking at photographs that tell a story adds something to imaginative powers. I am no Paul Rand but a touch of innovative diversity and visual philosophy can serve I think to aid develop our creative thinking.

M.

I’d love to travel to find new inspirations but money might be the problem!

Also speaking to people outside of the industry is refreshing and doing things like seeing live theatre, walking, speaking to people etc (all helps)

Travel is great as it provides a different view.

People will find inspiration in different ways.