A Thing On My Desk
May. 15th, 2006 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ltmurnauOne of my best scores EVAR at Value Village, years ago, was a ThinkTank.
It is a plastic sphere about the size of a head, and inside are about 13,000 little strips of styrene plastic with random, rather esoteric words printed on them - sameple:
frankness
katydid
codex
hostility
calcium
penknife
myopy
According to http://atomiq.org/archives/2002/07/5_think_tank.html, it was used as one of those random word generators and came with a booklet by Edward de Bono on how to use it in lateral-thinking exercises. About 25,000 were made, in the 1970s in Scarborough Ontario. Most were white, some were red or black or green.
My Thinktank is one of my precious possessions. It never fails to excite comment at the office when someone sees it. I try to take care of it, sometimes I am afraid to use it because one of the knobs or steel turners on the inside might break and I'd be reduced to shaking it like an Englsih nanny to get my random word inspirations....
It is a plastic sphere about the size of a head, and inside are about 13,000 little strips of styrene plastic with random, rather esoteric words printed on them - sameple:
frankness
katydid
codex
hostility
calcium
penknife
myopy
According to http://atomiq.org/archives/2002/07/5_think_tank.html, it was used as one of those random word generators and came with a booklet by Edward de Bono on how to use it in lateral-thinking exercises. About 25,000 were made, in the 1970s in Scarborough Ontario. Most were white, some were red or black or green.
My Thinktank is one of my precious possessions. It never fails to excite comment at the office when someone sees it. I try to take care of it, sometimes I am afraid to use it because one of the knobs or steel turners on the inside might break and I'd be reduced to shaking it like an Englsih nanny to get my random word inspirations....
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-15 08:56 pm (UTC)Like you, I've seen and used lots of manual random-thingy generators for creativity and loosening up, but the ThinkTank, with 13,000 words (well, I didn't count them, that's what they say it was loaded with) is the best manual device I've seen.