Transcript for EO403 - Creativity Methods - Osbourne checklist.PDF

Graduate Apprenticeship - Engineering Design and Manufacture Class: EO403 - Design for X Creativity Methods - Osbourne checklist In this video, we're going to look at a creative method called Osborn's checklist. So what is Osborn's checklist? It is a simple tool for increasing the number of ideas th...

Graduate Apprenticeship - Engineering Design and Manufacture Class: EO403 - Design for X Creativity Methods - Osbourne checklist In this video, we're going to look at a creative method called Osborn's checklist. So what is Osborn's checklist? It is a simple tool for increasing the number of ideas that we might have to solve a problem. It consists of a very simple but comprehensive list of questions that we might have about problems or ideas that we've come up with, which can be used either individually to solve the problems or in group scenarios. This particular method was developed by Alex Osborn back in the '50s. He was the author of a book called Applied Imagination. And the checklist that he formulated was a way of getting ideas to be generated from other ideas. The key concept behind the checklist was building on ideas that had already been suggested. It is a flexible trial-and-error type of approach. You may know of another creative method called SCAMPER. This is simply a derivation of Osborn's checklist. And the questions asked in this checklist are very similar. The aim of Osborn's checklist is to encourage creativity and divergence when we're coming up with ideas or when we're trying to solve problems. The checklist adds order and structure to what could otherwise be quite a chaotic brainstorming process. Osborn's checklist works on the principle of addressing a particular focus. It might be an existing solution. It might be proposed concepts to a new design problem. And the questions are taken one at a time, looking at lots of new ways and approaches to solve that particular problem. So let us look at the different categories that are included in Osborn's checklist. Firstly, there is Adapt, then Modify, Magnify, Minify or make smaller, Substituting or eliminating, Rearranging, Reversing, and finally, Combining. By applying these to the particular problem, we can come up with many more new, creative ideas. So let's look at these factors in turn. Adapt. When we start designing, we have ideas and concepts. We want to generate as many as we can initially. Early on, we might look at the ideas that we've got and create new ideas by adapting them. We might maybe get inspiration from nature, from other products. We might make things brighter. We might change the look or the material. We might emulate or simulate other products that are out there on the market. So we're wanting to adapt the original ideas to come up with new ideas. We could modify. We could take original ideas, and we could look at something more complicated, something maybe of a different shape. We could look at something that we change to make it more reusable or give it a second life. We can make it stretchy. We can change the features of it and its properties. Two factors which we can apply to new ideas could be magnify, making them bigger, or minify, making them smaller. We can make a product longer. We can Page 1/2 make it inflatable so that perhaps it's small, and then it can become bigger. We can fold it. We can make it thicker and wider and taller and so on, thus producing many different ideas and concepts. We can also do the opposite. We can make things smaller. We can make them more economical. We can make them use less energy or power. We can use less material. We can change their size through different stages of use. We can make them narrower. We can make them thinner and so on. So we can create many more ideas simply by looking at size and scale of our original ideas. We can substitute or eliminate aspects of a product or a service or process. We can look elsewhere. We can change parts of it for different materials, which would give it different functioning properties. We could look at a different approach. We could take parts out, and we can remove aspects of the product as we develop in order to get more ideas. We can also rearrange things within our original idea. Is there something in the product that can be put together or taken apart to give us a different idea? Can we do something by hand or make it semi-automatic? Can we change parts to produce a different product? Can we have other layouts? Could we turn things upside down? Could we sort them? Could we turn them backwards? What could we do to rearrange our original product ideas to produce more concepts? And the last two items on Osborn's checklist are Reverse and Combine. So we could take some of the ideas that we've had early on, and we could turn them around. We could reverse them. We could take one look at the negative of what we've already come up with. We could look at the opposite of things. We could turn things backwards, inside out. And finally, looking at Combine. We can combine parts. We can blend aspects of a product together. And we can combine aspects of the product from different categories. So using any of these factors within Osborn's checklist, we can take some of our early ideas and develop many, many more concepts and ideas for products, for processes, and for services. When you're trying to come up with solutions to problems, why don't you try Osborn's checklist to come up with lots more ideas or concepts? Page 2/2