Stop thinking: The importance of creative time-outs

 Ever notice that when people talk about having a great idea, they often mention that they were in the shower when the idea struck them. Apparently this is more than just creative mythology, but a real phenomena that is known as incubation.  I came across the idea of incubation a few years back when I was doing some research on creative thinking, and stumbled upon the story of Graham Wallas, an English sociologist, who developed a framework for the creative thinking process. Wallas broke the process down into four steps, preparation, incubation, intimation and illumination. The incubation phase is most interesting in that Wallas believed it was critical for the creative mind to stop thinking about the problem for period of time, so that less useful information would fall away, leaving only more interesting solutions.

This was idea was backed up in several more recent research studies, including one in 1989 in which two groups of people were given a problem to work on for four minutes. One group was asked to work on the problem for the entire four minutes, while the other group was asked to take small breaks in which they addressed smaller, unrelated problems. The group that took the breaks ended up development more ideas than the group that worked continuously.

Bottom line is that the brain needs time to rejuvenate and clarify. For designers this is an important phase in the design process and provides an opportunity to get away from creative assumptions or approaches that are cliché.

 With this research in hand, possibly “showering” could become a new billable line item on designer’s invoices.