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Now one of the interesting aspects of human thinking is that we tend to make all sorts of assumptions.
About things, about the things around us. Now this is obviously very important
Without this process of assumption-making our life would be chaotic.
Ahm, however, in terms of creative thinking making assumptions and sticking to those assumptions
and accepting those assumptions can be a real impediment to looking at things in new ways.
So this next part that we're going to look at is about challenging those assumptions about your particular task or about your particular topic.
If we look at the chair as our example again we might list a number of assumptions and for the sake of the exercise
we might ask that you list 100 assumptions. 100 interestingly enough
is because we want you to go past the obvious things
We can begin by looking at say, assumptions about a chair in terms of how many legs it has
Usually a chair has four legs, usually a chair is for sitting on. Does that mean a cow is a chair?
Well, it could be. Usually a chair is a stable object, it sits on the ground.
Ah, it might be a cow then. Well, it could be.
Or a horse (laughs). Having gone through this process we then begin to challenge some of these assumptions
So, if we take the example that a chair normally has four legs, we might say well a chair might have one leg now
we know there are chairs that have one leg. We might say that a chair has no legs. Now that might seem ridiculous
to begin with but if we actually look at it and explore it a little bit more
We might conceive the notion of a chair that maybe is suspended in some way,
maybe is part of a wall, protrudes from some other piece of furniture ...
And you can see that you probably know examples of chairs that don't have any legs.
For instance a bean-bag chair doesn't have any legs. The person who thought about the bean-bag chair
came up with the idea of having it, perhaps thought as a starting point, 'how do i come up with something that doesn't have any legs?'
You might think, as we are sitting here, what else can I sit on? What else do I sit on?
How often do you see a group of little milk crates, for instance, around a back door or on a building site
or something and then immediately saying well this is where the guys sit to have a smoke
or a Farmers Union Iced Coffee ... product placement ...
So if you begin to think about what assumptions you're making
in your task, particularly as you've chosen it as something that you're interested in
and you're passionate about. Perhaps it's a political situation, perhaps it's something that a personal friend or relative
member of your family is involved in. Then you probably are making quite a lot of assumptions about it
You might have a black and white view of it, that this is right and that's wrong.
So you have to really begin to question what assumptions am I making?
What am I taking for granted? What am I not questioning? That's why we're asking you to come up with so many questions,
about the task that you've chosen. Now initially this might be difficult because we're not used to thinking in this way.
We're used to accepting this for what they are, how they are,
We're not used to challenging assumptions, in fact we're actively discouraged
to follow that process of challenging assumptions. Look at extremes, I mean, in challenging your assumptions
look at extremes. We've mentioned a chair that maybe has one leg or no legs
What about if you went to the other end of the scale and said, 'well let's have a chair that has 100 legs'
So that in actual fact, maybe an idea that comes from that is that the actual legs in fact become the chair.
Right. And, so that you can see that unless you put yourself in a position to actually push the possibilities
look at the extremes, then you're not going to be able to look at this thing other than how you normally see it.
So when we're looking at chairs, we're assuming things about chairs. When we think about it instead of being chairs
we think about it as being seating, from a different point of view, you can see we come up with different solutions to the problem.
This is what we're asking you to do.