Random word association is any of a class of creativity techniques that explore randomization. Most of their names start with word "random"; random word, random heuristic, random picture, random sound, etc. In each random creativity technique the user is presented with a random stimulus and explores associations that has a potential to bring novel ideas. The power of random stimulus is that it can lead you to explore some useful associations that could never be explored intentionally.
Random Word technique is the simplest technique of this class where a randomly picked word is used to generate new associations. By getting a random word and thinking how you can use it to solve your problem you are practically guaranteed to attack the problem from a different direction from that you would normally.
A random word map of money
Random word association can be used to stimulate open and divergent thinking and seek creative new ideas. We can also use it to re-ignite creative thinking when you are running out of ideas and to get people out of a rut when their thinking is still rather conventional.
Taken from http://creatingminds.org, they show us a way to to the Random Word technique.
How to use it
1. Find a random word
Find a random word that will be used as a stimulus for new ideas. You can do this in a number of ways, including:
- Look around you. What can you see? Can you see any words? What about things? What else is happening?
- Open a book at a random page. Run your finger around the page and stop at a random point. Look for a suitable word near your finger.
- Ask the people you are with to give you a random word.
- Select a word from a prepared list of evocative words (fire, child, brick, sausage, etc.)
Good random words are (a) evocative and (b) nothing to do with the problem being considered. Ambiguity also helps. Nouns are usually best, but verbs and adjectives can also be used effectively.
2. Find associations
Think about other things about which the word reminds you. Follow associations to see where they go. Think openly: associations can be vague and tenuous (this is creativity, not an exam!).
When working with a group of people, you can write these down on a flipchart as people call them out. It can be useful (but not necessary) to leave a space after each associate for use in stage .
3. Use the associations to create new ideas
Now create new ideas by linking any of the associations with your problem. Again, the linkage can be as vague as you like: what you want is ideas!
Write the ideas either next to their associations from step 2 or on a separate page.
If other people give ideas that trigger further ideas from you, then you can go off down that route to see where it goes.
As a variant, you can do stages 2 and 3 together, finding an association and an immediate idea from this.
I am seeking a way to reduce discomfort for passengers on trains.
With a group of passengers, we look out of the window and see a school.
Associations from school are learning, bullying, exams, playtime.
Ideas include teaching the rail company how uncomfortable the seats are, taking a firm stance in this, giving marks for different trains and seats and having games on trains so passengers do not notice the uncomfortable seats.
The evolutionary-computation model of creativity views random stimulus creativity techniques as mutation operators. Each such operator has some potential to bring a relatively small and beneficial change (innovation). Success of this process can be characterized by the innovation rate. In this context, it is the share of random stimuli that were useful among all presented. The innovation rate depends on the distribution from which the random stimuli are sampled. Improving innovation rate is an important research problem in human-based evolutionary computation.
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