I haven’t talked about creativity games in a while, so I wanted to touch on them again. As I’ve mentioned, play provides a way to create a space where there is no winning or losing, which makes it safer for people to practice speaking up. This only works, of course, if the people in charge are making it safe by appreciating all answers, not preferring some over others.
I think it’s cool that even if people don’t speak up, just by thinking up the answers they can stretch their comfort zones and exercise their creativity muscles, so it will be a little easier to speak up next time. Or the time after. Whenever it feels safe enough and they feel confident enough of their answer.
I’m going to draw some cards from the game Disruptus. This is a card game by Funnybone Toys designed to help people stretch their minds. There are four choices of what to do with the cards, then a box full of pictures of things. The four choices are:
Improve. Make it better: Add or change one or more elements depicted on the card to improve the object or idea.
Disrupt. Look at the picture, grasp what the purpose is, and come up with a completely different way to achieve the same purpose.
Create 2. Take any number of elements from each (of two) card(s) and use these to create a new object or idea.
Transform. Use the object or idea on the card for a different purpose.
I’ve selected 4 cards at random:
How can you improve, disrupt, create, or transform these images?
Here are some ideas I came up with; I’d love to hear yours. (Just as an aside, my insecurities come up too. I want to label these ideas as silly, or somehow put them down, so you won’t judge me too harshly for coming up with unusable or stupid ideas. But I’m not going to censor myself because of these insecurities. Please don’t censor yourself either!)
Disrupt: The sink is to wash hair in a hair salon. What if there was a chair that could rotate upside down, and lower the person into a sink? Maybe into a series of sinks, for shampoo and rinsing and conditioning. The person would need to be strapped in, but they might not need plastic covering since they will be above the water.
Create 2: That clothes hanger looks like it would work for a zip line with the rope. Maybe a zip line for clothes from storage to your hand, or a zip line for a person to get from one place to another. (We could even include the tall building and make a zip line that ties two buildings together!)
Transform: Use that high-rise for a farm. All those windows can let in light to grow plants. Maybe the center of the building can be used to trap and store rainwater.
Improve: Rope is really thick. That makes it good to support heavy things, but it makes it hard to tie it or tie things to it. But you could make a rope with a strand that has loops in it. So the loops would be tied into the strength of the rope, but would be sticking out all over so things can be attached.
What ideas do you have? I’d love to hear them!
Play Dates with Talia 