4/1 Blockbusting
How we are leveraging blockbusting in your thinking (reference class activities and readings as warranted). What role might form play in our ideas.
What is Blockbusting?
Adams talks about blockbusting as having a constant, questioning attitude. He describes this idea further, saying how as children, we were always questioning everything in the world (How does __ work? Why? Etc.). As we grew up into adults, we learned that the more intelligence, and knowledge that we have, the better. And all that questioning we did as a kid? It only shows others that we don’t have enough knowledge, that we aren’t smart enough.
But in turn, this causes us to assume things, and prevents us from thinking ‘outside of the box’ at times. It causes us to limit the way we think, which hinders creativity. Blockbusting is Adams’ way of describing exercises that we can conduct in order to break out of this mindset, and start to question things so to get our creativity gears working again.
Blockbusting Activities
Activity #1
To get us warmed up, we each took four sheets of paper and were told to draw four different objects: a tree, a green onion, a fridge, and a tv.
We each took a look at everyones drawings afterwards, holding them up one by one and talked about a couple of things that we were seeing in common or we were seeing that was different.
- We tend to draw what we can see: Looking at the trees, most peoples’ drawings did not have roots, like mine, even though they are extremely important to the structure of the tree. But looking at the green onions, most people had no problem drawing on the roots. This is because we tend to generate what we can see, unlike tree roots that are hidden underground.
- We tend to forgo context: A lot of people neglected to draw power cables on their fridges and t.v’s. We lose this thread of thinking: where does the power come from? How does the fridge/tv turn on / work? Regarding the fridge, most people also drew theres as closed, rather than open and showing the context inside.
This exercise helped turn the gears in our heads, and get us thinking into the context of our ideas even more, and what assumptions we are making about the experience that we can challenge and take advantage of.
Activity #2
Next, we were split into groups and tasked to design certain objects, such as a knife. We first came up with three characteristics a knife should have, and then were tasked with creating a knife that had none of the characteristics we had just listed.
Our group was a bit blown away, we had been so specific in our three characteristics that it limited us very severely as to what we can use and incorporate in our newly designed knife.
We thought about ways to cut that are more unconventional than just metal (water, heat, air) and also other body parts that people can use to cut with, or how people can cut without a hand (using a button, eye tracking).
Throughout this exercise, we were able to stretch our creativity and think about unconventional methods to create our knife. This definitely was a lesson that we took with us when thinking about our project.
Questions to Consider
Thinking back to our financial security project, we started to ask ourselves some questions that arose from our blockbusting activities. Where are the places that we can go outside the box, and produce something more unexpected for the learners? What ways can we push ourselves to steer away from more conventional, typical methods that we see, but still produce the same results?
Perhaps it’s not a typical human avatar that the learner is playing with throughout our game. Or maybe it isn’t just a digital game format, maybe it’s a hybrid of both a physical game board to play with in front of the learner, while also being accompanied by a mobile device.
Blockbusting has given our group tools and exercises in order to start thinking about the different ways we can push ourselves that we hadn’t necessarily thought about before.
