Beyond the familiar?: exploring extreme input in brainstorms.

This paper explores the potential of extreme input stimuli in brainstorming. Extreme stimuli contain unfamiliar, ambiguous, critical and or provocative elements. The instrumental use of extreme input has only recently been investigated as a promising technique in ideation to get participants to think beyond the already known. It is not clear, though, which extreme mechanisms are most likely to trigger creativity. To investigate this, four brainstorm sessions were organized, of which three relied on extreme input stimuli: Extreme Ideas, Extreme Characters and Extreme Personas. The fourth session did not employ extreme input. Four experts assessed the output via a creative-idea-count. The preliminary results suggest that using Extreme Ideas as input for brainstorming in the early ideation phase leads to more original ideas than employing Non-Extreme Ideas.