Lateral Thinking
Creativity and original thinking require breaking established patterns, intending to open one up to self-expression to promote creative potential. Kuschner is quoted here by Hassan, “when we play, we enter imagination mode. We break free from established patterns (Hassan, 2019).”
Again, the metacognition - or thinking about our thinking is important in that the goal is to truly invite play, curiosity with and accessing and playing with one’s imagination is key to practicing one’s creativity (Eberle, 1997; Osborn, 1953). Everyday creativity is an attempt to promote creativity through daily challenges.
Lateral Thinking was originally coined by Edward De Bono (Bono, 2016). Lateral thinking is a deliberate process of changing one’s foci or paradigm by proactively thinking differently than one’s normal way of thinking (Bono, 2016).
De Bono has derived many useful practices such as the Six Thinking Hats, PMI, PO, TAPPS, and Random Word Technique as mechanisms for changing our normal way of thinking and provoking a novel or original way of viewing problems or situations.
The intention for this study is to perform a daily practice that is completely novel and new to the author. These ‘daily challenges’ are an attempt to provoke seeing things in novel ways by getting out of routine activities, getting lost (intentionally), eating new foods, and doing acts that the author has never done before, as Hassan said it – playing to break free from established patterns.