Finding a topic for my major project was hard. Not only is it the omnipresence of content on the internet, that makes it look like everything that’s possible has already been done. It’s rather the question of what general topic should my piece of work be about. Setting a topic for my final project means having to spend a huge amount of effort and countless working hours on one specific topic. So I certainly did not want it to be some kind of rubbish that I would be sick of after a week of research. My topic had to be interesting for me, that was a critical requirement.

My critical incident was a dinner at Yates with my friends & family. My sister and I were discussing the problem I had when she started to brainstorm thousands of ideas to me. I was taking notes enthusiastically when our ideas started to get crazy: “A documentation about “Pokémon Go” as a travel guide”, was only one of a variety of weird ideas.

But the point is that talking to another person and exchanging ideas is an excellent way of refreshing your brain. Just talking to a family member, who would throw more and more ideas at me helped me enormously. We would combine all of our different ideas, taking the best of both worlds. This helps because sharing each other’s ideas actively encourages reflection of one’s own and creating new ideas from mixing existing ones.

“By openly sharing ideas and work, a team’s creative output is exponentially more than the sum of the creative outputs of all individual team members. While swarm intelligence is based on equal sharing of information, swarm creativity is founded on sharing ideas openly.” (Gloor, 2006)

This is how I ended up with my Lost-Places-and-how-they-tell-a-history-idea.

 

GLOOR, P.A., 2006. Swarm Creativity: Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks. Oxford University Press