Synectics & Pughsion™

As I’m fin­ish­ing up with an online Finan­cial Man­age­ment class that is all num­bers, I was just think­ing how I’d rather be facil­i­tat­ing cre­ative think­ing right now. Then I start­ed think­ing back about a pre­sen­ta­tion my for­mer class­mate Rebec­ca Mahl and I did on the prob­lem solv­ing method­ol­o­gy synec­tics, as well as a new method­ol­o­gy she cre­at­ed called Pugh­sion™.

Synec­tics com­bines group inter­ac­tion rules with a cre­ative process cen­tered around the use of metaphor, draw­ing analo­gies from diverse dis­ci­plines. For our pre­sen­ta­tion, Bec­ca and I dis­cussed the his­to­ry and gen­er­al prin­ci­ples of synec­tics, then led the class in a group exer­cise to try out the method. I cre­at­ed a spin­ner with dif­fer­ent objects and ideas that peo­ple could use as metaphors, and we asked the class to think about how we can help make recy­cling a habit­u­al part of every­day life. This was how we con­nect­ed this assign­ment to my final project, and Bec­ca also con­nect­ed this to her project.

Bec­ca found that our class seemed to be very engaged in the synec­tic class exer­cise, and they came up with some inter­est­ing con­nec­tions between recy­cling and their ran­dom­ly select­ed con­cept. How­ev­er, the class had trou­ble con­verg­ing back to find­ing a solu­tion to the prob­lem. The synec­tic exer­cise pro­mot­ed diver­gent think­ing and aid­ed in chang­ing per­spec­tives and how we viewed, com­pre­hend­ed, and went about solv­ing the prob­lem, but a point that was raised was, “…ok now what?”

Enter: Pugh­sion™.

Pugh­sion Dif­fu­sion from Rebec­ca Mahl on Vimeo.

I found Becca’s new method to be very inter­est­ing and the results gen­er­at­ed from the process were inspir­ing. Be sure to check out the Pugh­sion blog at http://pughsion.tumblr.com to see some of the under­grad­u­ate Indus­tri­al Design stu­dent con­cepts that came from using this method.