Shimpei Takahashi-Play this game to come up with original ideas

This ted talk is by Shimpei Takahashi who is a toy developer and who has a dream of creating new toys that have never been seen before so for that he began to work in a toy company nine years ago where his boss wanted him to give new ideas and he proposed some too but his boss always use to ask him that whether he had the data to prove it would sell, and to think of product development after analyzing market data.

So he uses to analyze the market data before thinking of a product. However, he was unable to think of anything new at that moment. 

As his ideas were unoriginal. He wasn't getting any new ideas and he grew tired of thinking most of us all had similar experiences and felt the same way. As the data was difficult to gather and the one is sick of thinking so instead of thinking for the date he used a game called Shiritori to come up with new ideas.

Now what is Shiritori? Take apple, elephant and trumpet, for example. It's a game where you take turns saying words that start with the last letter of the previous word. It's the same in Japanese and English.  Many random words will come out. We force those words to connect to what we want to think of and form ideas

One will end up with ridiculous ideas which is okay. The key is to keep them flowing. The more ideas one produces, we're sure to come up with some good ones, too. So here is one of the best example for it a brush, Can we make a toothbrush into a toy? We could combine a toothbrush with a guitar and we've got a toy we can play with while brushing our teeth. Kids who don't like to brush their teeth might begin to like it.

Can we make a hat into a toy? How about something like a roulette game, where you try the hat on one by one, and then, when someone puts it on, a scary alien breaks through the top screaming, as the picture below shows how it would look like.

Ideas that didn't come out while you stare at the data will start to come out. The bubble wrap, which is used to pack fragile objects, combined with a toy, made Mugen Pop which is a toy where you can pop the bubbles as much as you like. It was a big hit when it reached stores. Data had nothing to do with its success. Although it's only popping bubbles, it's a great way to kill time, 

 Ideas that didn't come out while you stare at the data will start to come out. The bubble wrap, which is used to pack fragile objects, combined with a toy, made Mugen Pop which is a toy where you can pop the bubbles as much as you like. It was a big hit when it reached stores. Data had nothing to do with its success. Although it's only popping bubbles, it's a great way to kill time.

Can we make a hat into a toy? How about something like a roulette game, where you try the hat on one by one, and then, when someone puts it on, a scary alien breaks through the top screaming, as the picture below shows how it would look like.

Ideas that didn't come out while you stare at the data will start to come out. The bubble wrap, which is used to pack fragile objects, combined with a toy, made Mugen Pop which is a toy where you can pop the bubbles as much as you like. It was a big hit when it reached stores. Data had nothing to do with its success. Although it's only popping bubbles, it's a great way to kill time, 

Anyway, by doing this we continue to come up with useless ideas. we up  with many trivial ideas. If we base our ideas on data analysis and know what we're aiming for, we'll end up trying too hard, and we wont be able to produce new ideas. Even if we know what our aim is, so it's better to think of ideas as freely as if we were throwing darts with our eyes closed. If we do this, we surely will hit somewhere near the center. At least one will. That's the one thing we should choose. If we do so, that idea will be in demand and, moreover, it will be brand new. That is how we should think for our new ideas.

The reason I have chosen this video is that we all face difficulties while coming up with new ideas so by this game we can have so many creative ideas but it doesn't have to be Shiritori; there are many different methods. All we have to do is just choose words at random. We can flip through a dictionary and choose words at random. For example, we could look up two random letters and gather the results or go to the store and connect product names with what we want to think of. 

The point is to gather random words, not information from the category we're thinking for. If we do this, the ingredients for the association of ideas are collected and form connections that will produce many ideas. The greatest advantage to this method is the continuous flow of images. Because we're thinking of one word after another, the image of the previous word is still with us. That image will automatically be related with future words. Unconsciously, a concept will be connected to a brush and a bubble wrap which will be connected to a something. We wouldn't even realize it. We can come up with ideas that we wouldn't have thought of otherwise.

This method is, of course, not just restricted for toys. We can collect ideas for books, apps, events, and many other projects. I hope we all can try this method. There are futures that are born from data. However, using this silly game called Shiritori, we can look forward to the exciting future we will create, a future we couldn't have dreamt of.

Here is the ted talk link:

https://www.ted.com/talks/shimpei_takahashi_play_this_game_to_come_up_with_original_ideas/transcript?language=en