Ways to generate original ideas.

Adrianna Woszczynska, 305575

Mind Map.A mind map is a diagram used to visually organize information. A mind map is hierarchical and shows relationships among pieces of the whole. It is often created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept, and other ideas branch out from those.

Mind maps can be drawn by hand, either as "rough notes" during a lecture, meeting or planning session, for example, or as higher quality pictures when more time is available. Mind maps are considered to be a type of spider diagram. A similar concept in the 1970s was "idea sun bursting".

Photos/visual sources.

Visual sources can give an artist inspiration to create their work. This also lets artists see other people’s work to base on their ideas or also collaborate with the artist to make a overall outcome. This also could be a first hand resource, what it means is that it could be their own photo so that they know what it looks like in real life.

Snowballing. In sociology and statistics research, snowball sampling (or chain sampling, chain-referral sampling, referral sampling) is a non-probability sampling technique where existing study subjects recruit future subjects from among their acquaintances. Thus the sample group is said to grow like a rolling snowball (similarly to breadth-first search (BFS) in computer science). As the sample builds up, enough data are gathered to be useful for research. This sampling technique is often used in hidden populations which are difficult for researchers to access; example populations would be drug users or sex workers. As sample members are not selected from a sampling frame, snowball samples, analogously to BFS samples, are subject to numerous biases. For example, people who have many friends are more likely to be recruited into the sample.

It was widely believed that it was impossible to make unbiased estimates from snowball samples, but a variation of snowball sampling called respondent-driven sampling has been shown to allow researchers to make asymptotically unbiased estimates from snowball samples under certain conditions. Snowball sampling and respondent-driven sampling also allows researchers to make estimates about the social network connecting the hidden population.

Questionnaires.A questionnaire is a research instrument consisting of a series of questions and other prompts for the purpose of gathering information from respondents. Although they are often designed for statistical analysis of the responses, this is not always the case. The questionnaire was invented by the Statistical Society of London in 1838. A copy of the instrument is published in the Journal of the Statistical Society, Volume 1, Issue 1, 1838, pages 5–13.

Questionnaires have advantages over some other types of surveys in that they are cheap, do not require as much effort from the questioner as verbal or telephone surveys, and often have standardized answers that make it simple to compile data. However, such standardized answers may frustrate users. Questionnaires are also sharply limited by the fact that respondents must be able to read the questions and respond to them. Thus, for some demographic groups conducting a survey by questionnaire may not be concrete.