Analogous Inspiration
What is the Analogous Inspiration card?
Get away from your desk and find fresh perspective to unlock breakthrough ideas.
It may feel weird to visit a hospital, or pause for a trip to the supermarket, when you’re working on, say, a music app, but that might be exactly what it takes to spark a transformative creative leap.
How to use the Analogous Inspiration card
This activity involves getting out of the building and exploring different environments. It helps you isolate elements of an experience, interaction, or product, and then apply them to the challenge you’re working on.
1. Before you go anywhere, ask your team to spend 10 minutes thinking about the activities, behaviours and emotions connected to your challenge. Have them write these down on sticky notes. As an example, “taking out the trash” might be the activity, and related emotions could include “disgust”.
2. Next to each scenario, ask the team to spend 5 minutes listing other settings or situations where the same behaviours or emotions occur. In the example above, an analogous situation might be “dog-walking”, because there’s also some potential ickiness involved.
3. Discuss the relevance of each situation as a group, along with the feasibility of visiting that setting.
4. Plan a visit to somewhere that will allow you to observe the activities/behaviours/emotions you’re interested in. Take pens and notepads.
5. During the visit, encourage everyone to pay close attention to the things you want to understand, but also remain open to any other unexpected inspiration.
6. Arrange a follow-up session where people can share what they discovered and discuss how that might change your creative approach.
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Analogous Inspiration is one of 54 ideation workshop cards inside the Idea Tactics card deck.
Ditch creative block and unleash big ideas with your team.