To Find a Wonderful Idea, You Have to Get into the Sandbox

OK Go is a band that does extraordinarily creative, innovative and powerful visual music videos like no one else – they are art forms in and of themselves. They pull off incredible feats without relying on the magic of digital effects, what you see always happened in real life and in real time.

Seriously, you need to check these videos out, no matter what your musical preferences are, those won't matter at all. Here are some I recommend (titles are links):

• Rube Goldberg Machine (This Too Shall Pass)
• Musical Obstacle Course (Needing/Getting)
• Zero Gravity (Upside Down & Inside Out)
• The One Moment (incredible synced slow motion)

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What these videos show is that these guys are masters at finding ideas. Extraordinary ideas. They also obviously have an amazing team and a considerable budget to pull them off, but plenty of uninteresting ideas have that and get made.

Below is a TED Talk they gave on "How to Find a Wonderful Idea". They point out that the usual approach of sitting in your chair (or other favourite thinking spot) and dreaming up an idea, then planning and polishing it before executing it is missing a vital step: the "sandbox" – that place where you play and discover or unearth your real idea, the wonderful one that the preliminary idea (which leads you to where the sandbox is) was just the seed for.

This feels so relevant to me right now as I work to prepare a big new room installation for the In Situ multi-arts Festival at the Small Arms Inspection Building in Mississauga. Click here for more info in my News section.

I had an idea for the installation but did not get the grant that would fund it. So now I am in my sandbox discovering the new form(s) it will take, and hoping that in the course of my tests, experiments and discovery process, I will unearth that wonderful idea...

​...the one that is waiting for me to find it.

Getting your hands dirty is a vital part of finding your next wonderful idea. Photo: Kim-Lee Kho

Have you unearthed some of your own wonderful ideas in a sandbox of some type? What's your favourite sandbox? If you haven't tried it, where could you start? Let me know in the comments below!