Snip!t from collection of Alan Dix

<p>Creative activities often follow a double-hump model. At first you'll hit all the obvious ideas. These aren't a waste of time; sometimes the obvious ideas have been neglected and you can treat those as low-hanging fruit: obvious, easy to implement, incremental improvement. But you'll find that you run out of steam with those ideas. Like the false ending in a '80s rock song, don't think this fadeout means it's time to start applauding. There's still more. Push on, and this is when you get to the transgressive, weird, crazy and sometimes innovative ideas. That's the place you want to get to, where you are truly butting up against the edges of what's allowable.</p> <p>There's a drop in energy between humps One and Two, as well as many lull points through the entire process. When that tapped-out, stuck feeling comes, a technique for moving ahead is to deliberately generate bad ideas. </p> <p>Bad ideas are not boring, meh proposals. Bad is not the absence of good. These ideas should go beyond provoking "That's stupid!" to eliciting a much stronger response. Bad ideas might be immoral, dangerous to the user or bad for the business itself.</p> <p><img src="http://www.core77.com/blog/images/2012/05/portigal_sketches.JPG" alt="portigal_sketches.JPG" height="351" width="468"></p>