Ideate Box
“Idiot box,” “get boxed in,” “go home in a box,” and the dreaded “think outside the box,” few utilitarian devices get vilified as much as the box. Duffle bags get romanticized. They go to all the sporting events. They play key roles in action movies. In daily life, duffle bags are like unicorns compared to boxes. If a well dressed stranger approached you with a duffle bag, I imagine your heart might flutter wondering “is this a cash jackpot?” or “please don’t be human heads, please don’t be human heads, actually please do not be any kind of heads.”
These are not rambling thoughts about the glamour of duffle bags though. These are rambling thoughts of the usefulness of boxes. Sure, two dozen duffle bags full of cash would be nice, but could you imagine trying to stack them? This is why we need boxes in our life.
By the time a twenty-first century person is in middle school , they likely have been instructed to think outside the box or even had something marketed to them that is branded completely out of the box. In the workforce, we are spurred to come up with out of the box solutions. I wish I believed this was a fad, but it’s not. Just as “awesome” still finds ways to survive, “out of the box” has been around for more than a half century and shows few signs of ever going away completely.
If you are like me, you probably imagine a stiff walled box with five closed sides and a top that can be opened. The “box” that started all of this thinking could probably be better described as a grid, since it was just nine dots arranged to form a square. It was part of creativity study. Regardless, the saying caught on and began to spread. As it did, the box began to loom bigger and bigger. Soon the box held everything that was traditional, ubiquitous, and mundane. If anything was going to be worth the boss’s attention, it could only be found in the wilds of outside the box.
Now imagine you are sitting in a classroom on a college campus in the early 1970s. You are presented a piece of paper with nine dots arranged into a square. You are challenged, “connect all nine dots by drawing four straight lines without lifting your pencil from the paper.” While you are imagining yourself in that room, but before you take on the challenge, look around. What do you see? Desks? Windows? A chalkboard? Disheveled paper? A bookshelf? Doors? Do you actually even see a box? Was there ever really a box at all? Is the room the actual box?
It’s easy to get trapped in other people’s paradigms. Boxes can be useful. The parameters that will guide the success of a project can be used to create the walls hold planning and development together. Boxes can be long, short, wide, tall, etc.The box is only as real as you imagine it to be, and it is an utilitarian tool.
Don’t malign the box. You just might need it when a generous stranger hands you his thousand marbles.
Hey, if you are still imagining yourself on that college campus in the 1970s, I hope you are having a groovy time. Don’t forget to look down at your pants before you go. I bet they’re pretty cool!