Quote Originally Posted by mklotz View Post
I've found a workable, at least for me, way to stimulate the "blindingly obvious" breakthroughs in my designs.

After I've designed the device in my head, I consider each part separately, asking "what is the essence of this part". For example, the essence of the clamp body is "a long thing with regularly spaced holes". Once the essence is established I try to think of available objects that already satisfy that essence. If something occurs to me I consider if it could replace the object in my mental design that stimulated the search. Many times this leads to alterations in the design but that's all right as long as the final design is simpler or cheaper.
This reminds me of the brainswarming concept that Tony McCaffrey discusses in Overcome Any Obstacle to Creativity. At the end of chapter fourteen, there is a table of fifty "viewing lenses", with an example of each one applied to a plastic chair. There are basics like material, shape, size, and color, mass, etc. He also specifies characteristics like "spatial relations among parts" (for a chair, it's "The bottoms of all four legs form a plane"), superordinate/subordinate (for a chair, the superordinate is furniture and the subordinate could be a rocking chair or bench), and "equipmental partners" (for a chair, it's table or desk).

The purpose is to force your mind to perceive objects by their characteristics, rather than the role that we've assigned to them due to functional fixedness, which limits our perception of an object to its standard use. The fixedness probably evolved out of necessity (so that each time we pick up a hammer we don't think "hmmm...what is this for?"), but it limits creativity.