bisociation

=Identifying design opportunities through 'bisociation'=

Bisociation is a lateral thinking technique based on the work of the philosopher and writer Arthur Koestler, who highlighted a link between creativity and random thought processes. The idea is that the mental 'collision' of seemingly unrelated words can result in creative thought. This strategy encourages you to think creatively about opportunities for design and allows you to gain expertise in the framing of design briefs.

Using the strategy:
The activity, which usually takes 45-60 minutes to complete, encourages teamwork by engaging you in discussion with your colleagues about design opportunities.

Firstly, find yourself a partner to work with. You will then need a book (any novel will do), pen and blank sheet of paper, or better still, a pre-prepared grid like the one shown below. You will need to decide who is going to write things down, and who is going to be the ‘free thinker’.



Next, a suitable context and activity are chosen from a number of given possibilities, for example, you might choose say **//storage//** and **//sport//.** These should be written in the spaces provided on your sheet of paper.

Now you need to obtain a random or 'seed' word by choosing the first noun in a given line on a given page of the book. This could be done in other ways - for example by using a random word generator (obtainable from the www) or it could be the first object seen when looking out of a window).

=Now for the creative bit....!= The ‘free thinker’ calls out the first word that comes to mind when thinking about the seed word/object, this is recorded by the scribe. You continue with this process, quickly building up lists of words by free association. You should keep making mental links between the words generated and the context/activity to see if a suitable design opportunity emerges. The proceedings can be halted at any time by yourself or your partner as soon as a productive link is found. To round off the activity, any design opportunities that have emerged can be refined through further discussion. You should then try to express each design opportunity in the form of a design brief.

Below is a completed example to give you an idea of how it works.



HOME