The Brick

The most common use of a brick is as a building material, of which has various types–from hollow to solid, and from clay to cement. Speaking of clay, in certain movies, a brick is used to murder someone by banging it on the back of the person’s head. Not that I am a murderer myself, but for some reason most movies use bricks as a murder weapon.

Two bricks can also be used to start a fire by abruptly rubbing them against each other, generating friction enough to initiate the combustion of light fuel. Bricks can also be used to form a pot for a plant or decorate a garden as tiles. In an office desk, a brick could also be used as a rustic paperweight. At home, a brick can also be used to stop a door from closing. A brick can also be used as a ruler.

Based on resources online, a brick can also be used in cooking by using its weight to flatten a whole chicken during cooking. Bricks can also be used as weights to keep balloons tethered to the ground and prevent them from flying away to the sky (for helium balloons at least).

Observations from this exercise

• Noticed I went from wide to narrow when coming up with more uses for bricks
• It was harder to come up with uses the more I already had because I had to think of a different use other than what was already stated

Process of coming up with my list:

1. Preparation: Briefly think about the physical definition of a brick and make a visual image.
2. Incubation: Iterate through known common daily tasks.
3. Illumination and Verification: For each task, ask “Can this be done with a brick?”. If yes, add the task to the list.

If we base the cognitive theory of creativity on metrics of fluency, originality, and flexibility, then the theory explains the process I went through quite well. It explains, quite well, the fact that creative people have a deeper understanding of the industry or domain in which they are working compared to other people to come up with new and original ideas.

Since I wasn’t too familiar with bricks, I was only able to think about surface-level uses of bricks that weren’t too original (by this I mean some other person would have come up with the same uses of a brick that I have in the list). However, this exercise also illustrates the role of flexibility in one’s creativity, which explains the struggle I had during the end of the exercise trying to think of more “out-of-the-box” ideas that are non-mundane and are not identical to the previous uses already listed.

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