Dreaming is a Natural Function of Being Human…

Uncontrolled, it is our dreams, nightmares and lucid dreams that happens while we are sleeping as our subconscious surface.

Conscious “dreaming” or day dreams is something we do when we are bored, or building up hopes for the future.

It is also a mental “muscle” that tends to be strong in younger humans, but if left alone, will gradually decrease in ability as humans aged.

Part of the disillusionment of older humans comes about when they lost the wonder, they used to view the world. With the “lost” of their dreams, they also let go of their hopes and become “beaten” by the world.

Dreaming is Closely Tied with Creativity Because it is the Door Through Which We Imagine…

And with imagination, we gain ideas, hopes and motivations to stablise our mental state, create new experiences, influence the world and draft out a better future.

There are some in the class who insist that they are not creative. But the thing is as humans we are born creative. It is part of our biological function, the issue is how we “perceive” creativity.

It is easy to identify the artistic dreamers by their doddles and sketches, but different humans express their creativity differently. Some view the world in sounds so they create music, some need to move around so they create dance, some see the patterns in the world so they create logic… and all of it are but different expressions of human creativity.

So don’t discount yourself as “not creative”.

Recognise that creativity is part of us, we just need to learn how build our mental “muscle” to dream.

We also need to practice dreaming in focus areas that is not so intuitive to us (but can be learnt), so that we don’t lose our ability to imagine and solve different problems as we grow older.

To “Learn” How to Dream, How to Imagine, How to Get New Ideas, How to Create Hope…

We have to build up a learning sequence that we can keep practicing and improving, like mentioned in Section 3: Learning How to Learn.

Those in the field of design have a variety of methods to generate new ideas to solve problems. Let’s go through one of the methods.

Affinity Diagram is an Ideation method that is commonly utilised as part of the design brainstorming flow, for creation of information content or building of software product and services.

Usually done in a group, you can also utilise the steps of creating an affinity diagram through individual effort, done overtime.

At a group level, you can first identify an opportunity to create or a problem to solve.

• Craft out the problem / opportunity statement.
• Get each of the group members to write down pieces of data / ideas they can think of that maybe needed or can play a part in solving the statement.
  Usually ideas are written in sticky notes or small pieces of paper and stick to a large board.
• Choose one idea note at random, make it the first of a group.
  We are now doing a process known as “clustering” to group “similar” ideas together.
• Choose another idea note and ask if it is similar or different to the first idea note.
  • If similar, stick it under the first idea note to establish the 1st idea pillar (cluster).
  • If different, stick it at the same level of the first idea note, but spaced out, to establish the 2nd idea pillar (cluster).
• As a group, iterate the process from step 3 and 4 to complete sorting out the gathered idea notes into their most similar idea pillars.
• These pillars become the “day dreams” of the group as they seek to solve the given statement.
• As a group, discuss and condense the individual idea pillars into key considerations and probable solution steps. This will be the “seeds” that will guide your planning to create something new.

Trap Your Muses…

At an individual level, you can repurpose the group method as individual steps to “contain ideas” close to your focus areas.

First, identify your interests within the fields of creation and building.

Second, identify the right digital tool(s) that can give you the “digital space” to contain your ideas and references from others.
E.g.,

• it can be a simple word document that you can fill as an idea journal,
• you can also use Miro or Adobe XD which are “canvas” technologies to store imagery ideas that could be generated by yourself or others (remember to keep the reference of who created the original works).

Third, keep up the habit of storing the ideas you created or encountered in the world (created by others). Overtime, you have a repository of ideas that you can quickly tap on or refer to for inspiration.

The habit of “storing ideas” is a necessary habit as a creator because there will be times when you hit a mental roadblock and cannot dream or imagine as easily.
If you have been saving up the ideas overtime, you will be able to overcome what is commonly known as the “writer’s block” or “creative slump”.

The novice creator will commonly hit creative blocks due to fear of imperfection. That’s why it is critical to begin saving and trapping ideas and inspirations to motivate and build confidence in yourself.

Once you master the ideation processes, your worry wouldn't be running out of ideas, but instead you will be figuring out which ideas to prioritise and do. Which will be covered in Section 5 and Section 6.

An example of how Affinity diagram is utilised at a group level in software development can be found in the blog post of a StarHub App Designer. Click on the link below to take a look at her experience.

Ref: https://medium.com/ux-journeys/making-telco-users-happy-a-user-centric-revamp-of-my-starhub-app-fd0c72df94b

For a collection of online design toolkit, you mean also take a look at The Hyper Island Toolbox.

Ref: https://toolbox.hyperisland.com/