Personal tools

There are a fair number of purpose-built creativity programs. You'll find references to them in the Australian creativity home page - http://www.ozemail.com.au/~caveman/Creative - but there's plenty that you can do with off-the-shelf software. Take a word processor. Most have an outliner - an excellent tool for structuring what you already know about your problem. A dump of what's in your brain is a great start to moving on to new ideas. When you are ready to get creative, a spell checker or thesaurus can help. You can use a spell checker on a nonsense word to generate new ideas. Say I was having trouble finding a house. I might enter the word "narp" - the first thing that came into my head. This produced amongst others "ARP" and "nark". The ARP was a wartime air-raid protection service in the UK - ARP might make me think of chartering a plane to look out for likely houses. The thought of being in a plane gives me a wider view - up until now I might have been using estate agents (Realtors) in a particular town: why not try the surrounding towns as well? A nark in English slang is an informant. Have I checked all the sources of information? If I'm moving to a new area, I could find a local person to go round the agents and get details for me - usually getting better results than being on a mailing list. These examples aren't brilliant, but they illustrate the point. A thesaurus is good too, particularly for finding a new product line or a new way of packaging an existing product. Perhaps I want to find a new way of selling pens. My thesaurus turned pen into words like corral and feather. Corral made me think of a coral reef (cheating? No, creativity). Why not make pens out of rock that feels pleasant to the touch. Or use coral-tinted ink. The feather - I'm always losing pens. Why not produce an object as covered with cheap disposable pens as birds are with feathers. Then I can just pluck one off whenever I need one. The mundane word processor has a lot going for it as a creativity tool.