This post may be a bit of a ramble. Where do your ideas come from, and how do you settle on a "good" one?
Sources: surroundings; people; previous ideas from elsewhere; or out of thin air? I’m a firm believer in the "Milton Berle" school – steal from the best, and make it your own.
These posts don’t come out of thin air. They are usually based on something going on, and they are an exercise in pulling thoughts outward. At my office, we often have brainstorms, where one account team picks the brains of everyone else and steals their ideas. A great way to solve problems in my experience.
Do you steal? I bet you do.
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The best design I’ve come up with took a matter of minutes to congeal. Or, looking at it another way, it took more than two decades.
I spotted a problem with group dynamics that really quashed discussion and thought about that for over 20 yrs. Then late one evening in the stacks of a university library I happened to have two texts open at once … one on “discourse ethics” (Jurgen Habermas) and another on the Open Access movement (John Willinsky) … and *klik* literally a Eureka moment.
But, key, I’d been priming the pump for years. I thinks that’s how it happens.
–bentrem
p.s. I’m disappointed to see how many people pretend to believe that “good ideas are a dime a dozen”.