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Creativity & Problem Solving How to solve problems you have not seen before and produce original work on purpose: Polya's phases and heuristics, reframing, divergent versus convergent thinking, quantity before quality, constraints, incubation, fixation and how to break it, what replaces brainstorming, cheap prototypes, critique that does not crush, and finishing.
43 cards · space to flip · 1–4 to grade · d to go deeper
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Reading list The works this deck draws on, in the order worth reading them. Cards point to a specific chapter or paper where one fits.
01 Book How to Solve It · George Polya The four phases and the heuristics, written for mathematics but used far beyond it. Read the first part (about forty pages) and treat the dictionary section as a reference. 02 Book What's Your Problem? · Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg The best short book on reframing, built around the slow-elevator example and five concrete reframing moves. Practical from the first chapter. 03 Book Creativity, Inc. · Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace How Pixar built a culture where candid critique improves work instead of killing it. The Braintrust chapter is the one to read first. 04 Book Art and Fear · David Bayles and Ted Orland A short book on why creative work stalls and why finishing many pieces beats perfecting one. The pottery-class story is here, told as a parable. 05 Book Where Good Ideas Come From · Steven Johnson The adjacent possible, slow hunches, and why ideas are recombinations. A history of innovation organised around how ideas actually arrive. 06 Book The War of Art · Steven Pressfield Names the force that stops you from working (resistance) and the professional habits that beat it. Short, blunt, and best read in one sitting. 07 Book The Creative Habit · Twyla Tharp A working choreographer on rituals, the project box, and scratching for ideas. The most concrete book on the daily practice of making things. 08 Book A Technique for Producing Ideas · James Webb Young About sixty pages from 1940 describing the gather, digest, drop it, and it arrives cycle that later research on incubation largely confirms. 