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Brainstorming

Brainstorming is an organized approach for producing ideas by letting the mind think without interruption.

Wikipedia.org

Either if you are a designer, advertiser or computer professional, or you exercise your profession in any other creativity-related field, you know brainstorming. You’ve used is more than once.

Brainstorming is the fun and somehow intimidating procedure where we search for ideas. We start from an aspect of the product/service and we reach a final and hopefully witty conclusion, which will help us develop our idea in the most innovative way.

I have three recommendations for you :

  • A sample solitary brainstorming procedure : Ivan at creativebits.org showcases a pretty simple and cool brainstorming technique. It’s fun, it’s simple, it’s like a game and I’m sure it will help you come up with some great ideas, whatever your field. Ivan also analyzes his creativity techniques in a well formed list here, I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.
  • As a natural evolution of previous idea, Joe Zandstra developed a sample beta web application that helps you automate the brainstorming procedure : MouseBrains v1.0b. It’s still in beta, and it may produce some seemingly wacky results, but dare to be different and choose one of the wackiest ideas you find. It may do the trick.
  • Finally, a Windows application that may help you : FreeMind. FreeMind is a “mind mapping software”. Practically, that means that you use it as a mapping application to put down your ideas in (digital) paper. Much better than traditional pen’n'paper techniques that ALWAYS come up in the dust bin accidentally. It’s somehow peculiar to use, but still it may help you in certain situations. See some screenshots before you download it, it’s well worth the puny MBs that requires on your hard disk.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2006 at 11:24 am by Sugar and is filed under Productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Brainstorming”


  1. Gravatar
    karagos says:
    February 13th, 2006 at 12:23 am

    Welcome to the club :-)
    i use Mind Mapping as a brainstorming tool the last 12 years…
    MouseBrain has fun…

  2. Gravatar
    Anthony says:
    February 13th, 2006 at 5:52 am

    Hmm, I’m not sure about mindmapping (although I only saw the screenshots, but I always prefer paper).
    On the other hand, MouseBrain is so much fun!! :)


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