Tag: creativity

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Fluorescent creativity

Fluorescent colours look brighter than the colours around them. That’s because fluorescent materials absorb light from the ultraviolet spectrum — which we can’t see — and re-emit it in the visible spectrum.

So while regular colours just reflect light from the part of the spectrum we can see, fluorescent colours borrow light from an unseen realm and shine it back at a frequency we can perceive.

The term highlight feels apt — they really do seem to hold more light.

And it gave me an idea: fluorescent creativity — the kind that brings in ideas from spectra that others on the design team can’t yet see, and makes them visible for the rest of us.

These ideas can shine brighter than anything we’ve encountered before, not because they’re louder, but because they carry energy from unexpected places.

Fluorescent creativity speaks to inviting in different perspectives, and tuning our own sensors into frequencies we hadn’t previously explored.

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Sleep, subconscious and napping at work.

This week we ran an online session in our Critical Thinking series exploring a topic not usually found in professional training agendas: sleep and the subconscious.

We often ask the question: When do you get your best ideas? Unsurprisingly, no one said “at my desk.” We usually use the question to explore idea generation, but here it opened the door to a deeper conversation about how insights often arise when we’re not consciously trying—on walks, in the shower, while dozing off.

We introduced the idea that our subconscious is always working, quietly filtering, sorting, and remixing our experiences. But like a party next door, we can only hear it if we turn the mental volume down.

We looked at:

  • The role of sleep cycles (NREM for data sorting, REM for pattern generation)
  • The value of unstructured time in creativity
  • Whether we should actually be paid to nap at work
  • How all this supports critical thinking at every stage of the OODA loop

Perhaps surprisingly, we started with a short guided meditation—done in the middle of a busy office—helped participants notice just how noisy their minds are, and what might be waiting underneath.

Sometimes our best thinking begins when we stop.

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Conceptual Design at Plymouth University

Oliver Broadbent stands next to a van that has the caption on it Creativty with Plymouth Univesity. Oliver is pointing at the word creativity. He was invited to the university to talk about teaching conceptual design

Last week  Dr Boksun Kim  Lecturer in structural engineering at Plymouth Univesity invited me to the engineering department at Plymouth University to talk about creativity with staff and students. Boksun had attended the two-day Advanced Conceptual Design course I run at the Institution of Structural Engineers. As a result of going to that couse she asked if I could come down to share some of my thinking with the department. I was happy to be asked!

A recipe for cooking ideas

In the morning I gave a 45-minute talk on conceptual design to a group of third-year students. In this short time I gave them a quick run through my process for having ideas. After this run through I asked the students to create their own recipe for creative thinking. The idea was to create a series of steps that they can ‘cook’   from next time they are set a design project. Continue reading “Conceptual Design at Plymouth University”