These are excerpts from my Master of Design thesis defense. I eventually wound up winning the Directors' Choice Award for my thesis, and proudly lost the University of Cincinnati's Three Minute Thesis Competition (where I presented all 62 pages of my thesis in under 180 seconds). I also submitted my thesis to SXSWedu and made it to the Standby List, and later on I distilled (and reformatted) my thesis and successfully published it in the Creativity and Human Development International eJournal.
My thesis focuses on childlike creativity. Early on, I hypothesized that almost all children tested score as creative geniuses (and all adults tested almost never do) due to the inherent gamification of childhood. I decided to warp childhood games—i.e., Musical Chairs, Duck Duck Goose, and Tag You're It—into design ideation games.
I tested my hypothesis with two groups of students taking the same course. The control group brainstormed logos in groups, and the experimental group brainstormed using the same prompts, but while playing my design games. In the end, considering my five core ingredients of creativity—fluency, flexibility, elaboration, originality, and utility—the experimental group's ideations proved to be significantly more fluent and elaborate, proving that my childlike design games do, in fact, augment creativity.