Technique N°11 - The Dreamer, the Realist and the Critic
A little of role-playing will turn your head upside down!
At eÿeka we believe that everyone is creative as soon as one opens his mind and lets ideas flow freely. To help creators from everywhere tackle brand issues, we are providing you with Creative Techniques. Browse them, play with them and add them to your daily creative process to generate your best ideas!
The process of generating workable ideas is iterative. The first step is to generate many ideas then review their potential. To help you achieve this, a little role-play can help!
The role-play will put you in the shoes of three profiles: the Dreamer, the Realist and the Critic. Each one has her own way of embracing problem:
- The Dreamer has unlimited power to solve it
- The Realist acts like an engineer
- The Critic challenges everything
Follow the steps below to deep dive in this concept:
- Write down your problem statement
- Start with the Dreamer and imagine that you have free wishes to solve your problem. List 3-5 that normally would be impossible.
Select one wish and analyze it: How could you make your wish a reality? What features, principles or concepts are the most important?
- Every time water is wasted someone appears to let you know
- When you are facing water related activities, you can listen to some voices that give you technique to save more water
- The used water can be automatically cleaned and re-used
- Play the Realist and try to make one of the features you extracted into a reality by engineering it. How about we do something close? How to achieve something similar?
- Now as the Critic to challenge your practical idea. What are the holes in it? What don’t work?
- Integrate with your other wishes and go back to your initial problem.
The Dreamer forces you to go beyond the reality and your standard mental models. The Realist brings your creativity into the reality and forces you to reconsider the problem in different ways. The critic transforms opens new creativity area by pointing out the defaults of your ideas (and thus forcing you to iterate).
Did you find new ideas to solve the problem? If yes, congrats! If not move on to the next technique!