In this video, I'm going to talk about creative thinking, and this wonderful place where in, design studio at our school, is a perfect inspiring environment to talk about creativity. Creativity is a capability to come up with original new ideas, and it's not something we usually learn in school, because in school, we learn how to find and remember one perfect answer to a question. This capability, this way of thinking, that tries to take our different possibilities and narrow down to one correct solution is called convergent thinking, because you are convergent for many possibilities into one solution, and it's good. Convergent thinking is really useful in school, as in everyday life. For example, while we're driving and we look at the traffic signs, we don't want to linger too long and think about what these signs could be. We want to say, "Okay this is the sign, I need to stop right now." Also for example, we don't want the doctors to get creative while they operate and try to rearrange organs to see how things can look like it, what could turn out. But this is exactly what designers do. What designers and architects normally do is not just trying to find one correct answer to a problem. Instead, what we do is we try to think in such way that we open up to new possibilities and new directions to solve a problem, because it's only from these unexpected new directions that the real new original solutions might come, and this way of thinking that open up possibilities it's called divergent thinking. Since divergent thinking is not something usually thought in school, it's something that the designers or architects should exercise themselves. There's many ways to exercise divergent thinking. I can give you one example of one exercise I like to call, "What stuff can be." That could be a good example of divergent thinking, and also an exercise in it. So the exercise I go like this. Take any regular object, for example a brick, and then try to think of as many uses of a brick that you can think of. So obviously, you can take a brick and stack it to build walls, but what else could brick become? So we can look at brick is heavy, so we can use it to press paper or it's red, so we can just use it as a chalk and draw, or we can take a look at a brick and see that usually bricks have these holes, so we can use it as a pencil holder may be. So the way we go about and think about all these new things and all these new uses for a brick, discovers a little bit of how the divergent thinking works. What we did here in this brick example is that, we looked at the brick and tried to forget everything we know about this object, and we try to observe this object with completely new eyes. So instead of looking at brick and look at the things we know about brick, we will be asking ourselves about. We're observing different properties of the bricks, so we've observed that. The shape, so that's why we can build walls. The weight, so that we can use it as a weapon. The color. That's why these observations that I mentioned in the last video, are really important for the creative thinking. Now, I don't want you to think that those designers just do divergent thinking. Actually, both create convergent and divergent thinking has their way in the design process. I can simplify the entire creative process in these couple of steps, following couple steps. At the beginning, there's always, as I said, observations. You try to look at the world and collect as many information that you can, and then you take these observations and then you try to imagine as many ways to combine them, and just to try to rephrase maybe the problem in as many different ways as you can. In other words, you diverge. Then when you have so many different options, and it's important that in this diversion phase, you don't want to judge. You just want to just think freely and open up as to as many things as you can. Typically, most of you may be know the concept of brainstorming, which is one of the most commonly use divergent thinking processes. Once when you are at a point that you have a lot of ideas, and a lot of them might be silly but that's okay, you're going to start thinking convergently. So you will try to think about all these ideas that you have, you will start to evaluate them, you will start to eliminate some of them, you will start to transform some of them, and very gradually basically, you'll start to narrow things down. It's never one solution, you want to narrow down to couple of solutions, but then you will get to test those things. So to summarize this. As a designer, you want to be able to think both divergently and convergently. So you observe, you go wide and silly, and then you converge to the right solution.