I just returned from the 2001 American Creativity Association's Conference in St. Paul. Two things from the conference sparked this Challenge.

I arrived a couple days early and toured St. Paul on my own, mostly on foot. As I walked around the downtown area and around the "Sky Walk" that connected most of the downtown buildings in St. Paul I came across examples from a city wide evidence of a fund raising campaign from last summer. They were nearly 6'-0" tall Snoopy figures (Charles Schultz' Peanuts character). Sparky, as he was called by his friends all of his life, was born and raised in St. Paul and is revered as a favorite son. In his honor the city promoted the Snoopy campaign. Companies, organizations, schools, individuals from around the city donated money and many designers donated time to create 101 completely unique Snoopys.

A similar campaign was run in Atlanta with 6'-0" tall baseballs honoring the Atlanta Braves and in Chicago I understand they used cows.

During the ACA Conference one of the speakers spoke of the "levels of creative thinking" from his perspective and listed them as....

1st fluency (quantity of ideas)
2nd flexibility (variety of ideas)
3rd elaboration (adding detail and perspective)
4th originality (uniqueness of ideas)

This week let's combined this two things: Snoopy Designs and these levels of creative thinking.

Choose one of your favorite cartoon characters or an object or thing. Copy it. Trace it. Enlarge your tracing to fill an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper and make 60 copies of it. You might make two fit a single sheet and make 30 copies.

Then each day carry them around with you with a box of crayons or markers and create up to twelve completely different designs.

Have fun. Let yourself go!. Let the childlike creativeness in your soul play with ideas.

© 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2006 Robert Alan Black, Ph.D. CSP