Creativity and Imagination: Gregg Fraley at TEDxStormont

like one of those exercises isn't it this little red spot here it is so amazing to be back in Belfast and be invited to speak at this incredible event so thank you very much for having me just another crazy American here to tell you something what I'm going to talk about is how to use your imagination everybody says use your imagination but does anyone ever explain how you might do it so let's have a wee flight of fancy if you please and I'd like you to imagine the following imagine yourself sliding down a huge half-a-mile slide you're completely naked and you're sliding into a huge vat of purple jello you're there all right so you're landing in the jello and you realize to your horror that you're in a Salvador Dali painting and you're the clock you know the one that bends over the edge of the the table and you realize that you have to get out of the Salvador Dali painting or you're in big trouble and you're looking around for a way to get out of the painting and you see a 300-pound taxi driver with one eye over there with a pink tutu and he's waving you over to his taxi and he's pretty scary looking guy but it's your way out of the painting so off you go so you get in the cab and he's driving you out of the painting and he's eating a 50 pound pickle shaped like a rugby ball and you're not worried about that so much but what you are worried about is that he's texting while he's driving so he drives you up to this spot and he points out the window wordlessly and on the sidewalk is a large plastic with yellow handles you know those drawstrings on the newfangled garbage bags and you see the drawstrings come open and close and open and close in at your subconscious your subconscious is telling you that there has to be something about that that might be useful to you in some real-world challenge that you have let me get to a slide here so that's what you've been imagining and so keep that image of the trash bag in mind and those handles and we'll come back to that in a minute when I first heard about this conference they said the theme is imagined and I thought wow what a great opportunity to talk about imagination because imagination is the working stuff of creativity and creativity is the bridge to innovation and that's what we all want whether it's for business or whether it's for our personal lives and I thought immediately also of the song John Lennon's famous song one of my favorite songs it's so amazingly compelling but there's something about that song that I have to take issue with and that's the whole idea of it's easy if you try yeah it's easy to imagine things when we're just having a bit of fun and thinking of 300-pound tutu wearing pickle eating texting cab drivers that's easy but what about when we're at work or we're at home or in some situation and it's really a scary situation it's a real world hairy problem a really complex difficult problem that gives you nothing but fear anxiety and doubt that's when imagination is not easy at all and what I want to do try to do today is talk to you about a couple of concepts one is a concept called scaffolding another is a concept called mashing up but first I want you to look at fray Lee's hipster quadrangle quadrant scheme related to how people imagine or don't imagine so it's basically two axes one is intention or usage of imagination and the other is awareness of it because after all we all imagine every single day everybody in this room has at least 65 thousand thoughts a day many of them are imaginative thoughts that might have something to do with solving problems in your life if you're drinking cappuccino or expresso you probably have 80,000 thoughts a day if you're in the middle of a divorce it might be a hundred but nonetheless you have a lot of thoughts and so where do you fit in Frehley hipster quadrangle are you a zombie a zombie is a person who is completely unaware of the imaginative thoughts that are floating through their brains and makes no active use of imagination never ask their own mind for answers for images for ideas to help them with something we should pray for these people because they need help if you lead people like this one way to kick them out of that quadrant into maybe the dreamer quadrant or the manager quadrant is to simply ask them to use their imagination hey Bob come up with five more ideas use your imagination come up with five more options on that challenge we're working through and who knows maybe you can get move them along dreamers are wonderful people there perhaps I am one of those much of the time I have a very easy time imagining things and I enjoy imagining things and I'm very aware of the imagination that I have and I notice things sometimes I even write them down and by the way if you want to be a more effective Imagineer one of the things that you can do is simply write your ideas and imagination down on paper in a notebook that will take you leaps and bounds farther than most folks the problem with dreamers is dreamers don't take action they might notice what's happening in their imagination but they don't actively take action on those things nor do they ask their imagination for specific images and ideas related to a specific challenge managers do ask themselves for answers for particulars but because they're not as aware of their imaginative stream they're not as aware of their subconscious they're not as centered they don't tend to have very visionary ideas and and I might change this terminology over time and change the word manager to more like gang leader or gangster because that's what that's what a street gang leader is a thug is a thug with a few ideas that they're taking action on that hasn't thought through things enough the ideal place to be is the leader quadrant that's someone who's aware of their imagination writes things down asks their imagination for more and better ideas all the time and takes action on them now I'm going to define leader broadly a leader can be a mother of a family a leader can be a person who works for themselves after all we do have to lead ourselves to better potentials as Jimmy Smith said so that's the hipster quadrangle here's the concept here's the concept I would like to convey to you today and it's called scaffolding so if you're in that place of fear uncertainty and doubt what do you do well the first thing you do the first level if you will of the scaffold and scaffolding up to imaginative solutions is simply to ask your mind for images ideas and fragments poems whatever comes to you and your imagination ask now sometimes you ask and nothing comes because you're so wound down in fear uncertainty and doubt so the advice then is to try the next layer if you will up is to try to relax Einstein one of the foremost thinkers of last 150 years easily spent a lot of time doing two things fiddling or violin violin and walking in the woods and he would walk in the woods and think and think and think and think about how the world worked and so he baited for about ten years while he was a patent clerk in in Switzerland and then of course ten years of thinking and he changed the world Thomas Edison was a great relaxer he would lay down on a couch in his laboratory with a copper ball in his hand and he would put himself into that trance that happens just before you go to sleep asking his mind for images related to challenges in his lab and he would drift off and he would see these images floating through his head and then when he sort of tipped over into sleep he would drop the ball on the floor it would wake him up and then he would get up and he would write things down and that's how he tapped into his imagination so relaxation is huge what is it for you is it walking is it playing guitar is it having a few beers with friends having more than a few beers with friends whatever it is for you you should do it more and that will put yourself into an imaginative state now the last technique is in my mind a power tool if you will for innovation and for use of imagination to come up with solutions and it's called mashups mashups are magic in my opinion mashups are basically conceptual blends of two very different concepts sometimes when you blend two things that have never been connected before you create something very very new and innovative and you can do it deliberately the reason I wore the headset today is because I have a Sony Walkman in my pocket so we're going to do if the old-fashioned audio tape cassette Sony Walkman right we're going to do a mash-up of this concept or what this embodies in this Sony Walkman with another challenge that I'm going to talk about in a second but when I thought about this object is Sony Walkman I thought of a lot of different things and that's what's depicted on my graphic there's the old those old cassette tapes and making mixtapes and when I started thinking of mixtapes I've sort of thinking about old girlfriends that I made mixtapes for and I thought of the disco era and rollerskates and I thought of well the Walkman because or pardon me the the iPod because that's what succeeded this as the the predominant mobile music instrument or system in the marketplace and it represented and that thinking had me thinking about change so those were the images that came to mind in my imagination which I wrote down when I thought about the first concept in our mash up example so I have a challenge I live in a small community in Michigan called Three Oaks Michigan Michigan is a very small village it's two thousand people mostly agricultural area it's close to Lake Michigan Michigan but not close enough to be a beach community so it's near a tourist area and there's a few tourist things that are starting to but up in Three Oaks including a brand-new Fine Art Museum a wealthy donor from Chicago who used to come to Three Oaks for vacations in the summer when he was a kid donated an incredibly terrific fine art collection to of Free Oaks Museum now here's the thing nobody knows about the museum nobody knows about the collection and the museum has the collection but they don't have any money for marketing so it's a very very low-budget operation but if we can just get people to the museum to enjoy this fine art it would be a wonderful thing so I'm mashing up my Sony Walkman and this challenge there's the depiction and I'm looking for ideas now ideas don't always come completely wrapped up in a bow when you ask your imagination for ideas they don't come up with a nice one-page right up to paragraph concept of a particular well fleshed-out idea what it what your mind your subconscious usually provides you are just images and sometimes you have no idea what they mean for instance my mind popped in a bicycle and so what I'm going to do is show you these images and talk about the ideas that I sort of came up with as a result of getting them so bicycles okay it reminded me that Three Oaks is in a place where there's a bike tour and there's a bike race every fall so a lot of bicyclists come through three Oaks get coffee via a croissant or whatever and then just keep pedaling through the through town and up the road so I thought okay maybe the museum could market itself in a small way to all the bike shops in Chicago and Gary and South Bend and the larger towns around three Oaks put a brochure in the bike shops and when the bicyclists get to the Three Oaks fine art museum TOFA as we call it provide them with some slippers to wear so they don't have to wear their their clunky bicycle shoes so there were some ideas the second thing that popped into my head was a giant pair of headsets bigger than a person and I thought hmm what does this mean well maybe it's that we're not listening to the local community about what this museum means to them maybe we're not listening to the customers that we do have maybe if we do a survey idea we'll learn more about what we should be doing to publicize the museum next image that came into my head was the same big headset but it was on a billboard and the idea for this came very quickly Wow we should be doing a billboard on i-94 which was only two miles away and has millions of people going by all the time so that's a pretty good idea and then I had further idea that we could partner with a distillery that just opened up and has some marketing money and we could maybe do a joint effort on the Billboard an old-fashioned radio came into my head and I thought okay radio we can't do radio spots it's too expensive but radio stations in the United States required to do public service announcements so we'll make up a public service announcement distributed to radio stations around our catchment area the Pinterest logo came to mind I thought what do we do with this I still don't know sometimes that happens so I move along hey even the idea man isn't perfect so I had this wacky image of a band but the band was holding different fine art paintings different styles when had a van Gogh when I had a dolly one had etc and I thought okay so bands music genres maybe we could invite maybe you could have a weekly concert and one week it could be bluegrass music the next week it could be country the next week it could be pop the next week it could be blues and that would be a way to draw people in with with concerts and then the craziest image that occurred to me was the old cassette tape from the Sony and the the audio tape had spilled out which happened to those tapes back in the day you spend hours getting it back in but I thought wait a minute what does that mean when it's it's superimposed over the map like that this is what came up in my head and I thought well ha we really need to be talking to the people in Chicago because there's millions of people there and we should be talking to the people in Gary Indiana we should be talking to the people in in South Bend and farther east in Detroit I thought well okay maybe we invite fine artists from each of those cities really popular fine artists to come and do an ancillary display at the TOFA Museum and then we could build weekend trips from those areas and partner with edit bread and Breakfast hotels in Three Oaks so those were some of the ideas I came up with now we're coming back full circle to the imagery that we started with so you see this trash bag now I'd like everyone to reach under their seat right now you'll find a small envelope a small brown envelope now I'm gifting each and every one of you in this audience with a condom but now what you'll notice about this condom when you use it later on or maybe you'll use it later is that it is a very innovative new condom and the condoms have been the same for how many years 40 years 50 years this condom has drawstrings did you know that 30 percent of condoms were put on wrong and this addresses that challenge and it saves a lot of problems let me tell you now I want you to take that condom home and do your own mashup with it with one of your challenges and that's all I'm going to say about it ladies and gentlemen imagination can be better for you you can be better Imagineers if you choose to be more imaginative if you ask yourself for ideas and images if you seek more ideas and you put them into action because after all ideas are meaningless if you don't put them into action thank you so much good luck with your mashup

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 173,646

Rating: 4.8014388 out of 5

Keywords: English, Creativity, ted talk, TEDxStormont, Northern Ireland, Innovation, tedx talks, ted, Social Change, tedx talk, ted talks, ted x, Imagination, tedx

Id: scVwv1g1cJc

Length: 19min 27sec (1167 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2013