Recreating the "Random Stimuli" Approach to Brainstorming at Home

After our first weekend of classes, one of the exercises I enjoyed the most, and hoped to recreate at home, was introducing random stimuli into my brainstorming sessions. Although I'm in a bit of a different situation than the rest of the class (I'm going for a PhD and not hoping to own or develop my own business) I thought it would be interesting to apply this technique in my approach to developing an abstract for a conference I'm hoping to attend next summer.

Called "Console-ing Passions," this conference is held annually in order to investigate issues of "television, culture, and identity, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality." Not only does this conference revolve around one of my main areas of research interest, but it also happens to be taking place in one of my favorite cities: Dublin!

Some friends and I at Trinity College, Dublin in 2006

So, in order to successfully attempt a true random stimuli-infused brainstorming session, I had my friend Meredith write down 6 random things on separate slips of paper and put them in a sealed envelope for me.

"Savit's Brainstorming Stimuli" from my friend Meredith

Next, I pulled up the Console-ing Passions 2015 Call For Papers on my laptop, spread out several blank sheets of paper, and got a box of markers ready, set my timer, and away I went! The first thing I did was write out in the center of the first sheet of paper: "Develop an idea for an abstract for Console-ing Passions 2015." Although this wasn't quite phrased as a problem to be solved, I was still aiming to be able to focus my brainstorming sessions while also being creative and open to whatever directions the random stimuli took me in.

At times I was able to really let the stimuli guide me; at other times I suspected that I was self-editing in order to remain within the confines of the topics slated for this year's conference, the theme of which is "Rebooting Feminism." The topics that are of particular interest to me are:

• "Rebooting Feminism," what comes after post-feminism?
• Media Production and Industries
• Media Audiences and Fans
• Social Media and Digital Domains
• Transnational Cultural Flows and "Expat" TV
• Neo-liberalism and Gender

After my alarm went off, here is what I had come up with:

The results of my brainstorming

Although there were a lot of random thoughts that I was able to jot down (usually set off by something Meredith had written for me) I think I honed in on some particular strands, and different seedlings of ideas. These included:

• Thinking about TV Recap culture and my longstanding history and interest with it (including writing Mad Men recaps for a magazine I used to work for.) This fits in with both the media audiences and fans topic of the conference, as well as media production since it is a form of media production in and of itself. I scrawled out ideas about how the increasingly popular binge-watching form of watching TV is somewhat at odds with recap culture, and jotted down some ideas about how gender can be incorporated into this.
• Similarly, I seemed to focus on the notion of "consumption" on television, particularly the idea of women consuming, and what kind of women consumed. On the sheet of paper on the top row, second from the right, I began listing all the characters and shows that I watched this year that featured women eating, and those that purposefully did not. I'm not sure what I could do with this, but my mind keep returning there.

All in all I think it was certainly a helpful exercise and my mind did go off in directions that I don't think it would have without the random stimuli. That said, I don't think this method is ideally suited for someone working alone, and in hindsight, I wish I had gotten some friends from the GCS program together to do this, especially because these conferences accept full panel submissions, meaning we could have worked together to not only brainstorm and generate an idea, but then continued to work together for our conference submission, and not just simply helped each other generate ideas that we would then go off and develop on our own.