How to Choose a Pet

Prepared for A Crash Course on Creativity Spring 2013

Team Gx2: Mannie Zeller & Susan Lieberman

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.

Cosmo1996 - 2013

When Cosmo left us …… we were so sad - Cosmo had been a dear friend to all of us and we missed him very much. Our other cat, Millie, had lost her companion.

A New Pet?

• At first, we mourned him. And then, we started to think about getting another pet.

• It didn’t have to be another cat• We decided to …

Brainstorm!!!!!!!

And we were fortunately joined by a third excellent brainstormer…

• We started to brainstorm the question “How would you pick the right pet for you?”

• But, this course taught us to look carefully at framing of questions

• Looking closer at the question, we realized that what we were actually brainstorming was “What factors would you consider when choosing a pet?”

~ 34 ideas

• But, then we stopped to get our bearings and realized that we had veered into considering “How do you find the right pet?”

• So, our brainstorming took a different direction

~ 28 more ideas

~29 more ideas

• But our third excellent brainstormer then pointed out an interesting fact

• The broader the question, the better the brainstorming; the narrower the question, the less effective the brainstorming

• At which point, we started to have some fun brainstorming “How do you take care of your pet if your pet is the planet Earth?”

Put a shawl

around the world for comfort

The Earth needs to

be nourished

The earth

needs a protector – yea for the sun

The Earth needs a friend - yea the moon

The world should

sing

The world

needs to dance

The world needs colour

The world needs love

Let the world begin!

Give the world a parade

11 more items

Will the earth purr?

• Or “If PET stands for Peace on Earth Through-out, how can we have world PET?”

At the end of the day, we realized that even though we had brainstormed more than 100 ideas, what we really wanted was to figure out how to select a new cat to be our special friend (and Millie’s, too)

• So our final brainstorming looked at a combination of the questions – “How should we find a new

cat to be Millie’s companion?”

– “Where will we find a new cat or kitten?

– “What kind of cat or kitten should we get?”

And we decided to do all the expected things, like research breeds, track cat ads, visit one or more animal shelters, and talk with friends

But we would also “commune with the spirits” to find direction

And we would have patience

Sources of Images Images and sounds in this

presentation not already cited are from the following subscribed (s) or royalty-free (r) sources

Microsoft Office clips (s) www.iStock.com (s) www.Animation.com (s) Wikipedia Commons

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