Creative Whack Pack is like V8 Juice. It generates that spark of an idea  followed by “Duh…” and a smack on the forehead.

Developer Creative Think’s Creative Whack Pack is more an animated deck of cards than what most people think of as an app. It’s based on a book of the same name and consists of 64 cards (with illustrations and text).

Each “Whack” is a creative strategy designed to help you find new ways of approaching a problem. It’s not the cliched, “Think out of the box thing” you often hear. It’s more about finding novel and unexpected ways to achieve your creative goals.

The deck is sorted into for main sections: Give Me a Whack, Whack of the Day, Creative Workshop and Card Index. The cards in Creative Whack Pack are interconnected — you may encounter the same card through difference categories. If you’re a bit geeky, think of it more as a relational database than a flat file.

Give Me a Whack is a stack of cards designed to kickstart your thought processes, using examples of how other people have solved problems. Be willing to take calculated gambles, do the unexpected, juxtapose what appear to be incompatible ideas or situations and look for similarities.

Here’s a quick example. A fish farmer’s customers’ complained his fish tasted “flat.” The farmer knew why. The fish just weren’t active enough. His solution? He introduced a predator fish into his fish farm, which caused the rest of the fish to constantly stay on the alert and high tail it whenever the predator was feeding. Sure, he lost a few fish, but he more than compensated for that with better revenues. The moral here: Don’t be afraid to take risks.

Today’s Whack is to look beyond hype and scrutinize whether an idea will have the results you want. Think critically and cautiously.

The core of Creative Whack Pack is the Creative Workshop. It’s the primary idea incubator when you’re trying to solve a problem, gain more insight into an issue or develop a concept. You can choose one of four sessions: Oracle, Four-Suit Classic, Imaginative and Practical. Which session you use depends where you are in your creative thought process. It might be when you’re close to making a decision, or looking for a more imaginative solution.

Under Card Index, the deck’s 64 cards also are sliced into four 16-card suits: Explorer, Artist, Judge and Warrior. Each represents a mode of thinking. The Artist, for example, represents your role as a person who re-purposes existing resources or spins new ideas out of traditional ways of thinking. They are techniques, in other words, which you can use to generate new techniques for creative problem solving.

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category: Business