Creativity is essential to doing design thinking. Everyone can develop this skill at different levels. The books in this section provide ideas to enhance creativity.
Graphic Design Thinking, edited by Ellen Lupton, builds on existing design thinking methodologies by showing how to employ various brainstorming techniques in various design process stages such as problem definition, generating ideas, and creating possible solutions. Informal and more formal methods are used to enhance the creativity.
Design thinking terminology is not the only game in town. Dave Gray et al.’s creativity enhancing book Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers covers a wide variety of games individuals can play to increase creativity. Some creative game names include “object brainstorming,” “the cover story,” and the “anti-problem.”
Several textbooks provide a stream of ideas and exercises to enhance individual and team creativity. For example, Lynn Seelig’s Insight Out: Get Ideas out of Your Head and into the World and Brad Hokanson’s Developing Creative Thinking Skills can easily be used for college and other education venues. The latter includes a semester-long structure filled with exercises on topics such as divergent thinking. In a more comprehensive view of creativity, Creative Problem Solving for Managers, by Tony Proctor, is a textbook that provides exercises and models of creativity to assist managers in incorporating a wide variety of employees into projects.
The art world has provided inspirations for two books on creativity. Harriet Griffey’s I Want to Be Creative: Thinking, Living and Working More Creatively also includes exercises such as daily doodles that can be especially used by artists. Twyla Tharp wrote The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, which provides readers with thirty-two practical exercises based on her thirty-five years of experience as a dancer. One of her exercises is the coin drop, in which coins are dropped on the floor to analyze what patterns they create.
