Ask HN: Does being practical act as a hinderance to one’s imagination?

Maybe your vocabulary of archetypes is just limited? Do you read non-technical books regularly?

It may help to adapt some tools. For example, in the tabletop RPG world, a lot of random tables are used to develop new concepts for stories, characters, interactions, missions, and so on. You roll the dice a few times and suddenly you have a very unique and imaginative idea indeed. You can draw up your own random tables and tweak them over time, like creating software.

There are also sensory cues: You might choose a new location to do your gaming, play some appropriate mood music, etc. On one of my first ever "software guy does graphic design" projects, I asked the client what music they liked, and then listened to that for about 3 days straight. It really helped me get into the correct problem-solving lens where more appropriate colors, shapes, fonts, and textures were concerned.

On top of that you may find there are supplements that help you out. Personally if I'm running on 8+ hours of sleep and take about 100mg caffeine, I feel like I can solve just about any problem and new ideas are more likely to seem fun. ;-)

In the past I wrote some randomization software to help me solve problems. One of my favorites simply picks random words out of a dictionary. Each word is treated as a metaphor. I remember once a client said, "I thought I knew exactly what you'd say, but that is an idea that never would have occurred to me." This was my goal.

IMO there's a lot of space to grow in this area even if you feel like a potato where your imagination is concerned, and the process can be really enjoyable. Good luck to you.

"Outrageous" or "out-of-the-box" solutions are just very lateral solutions to a problem, and in an engineering context you can do this by questioning the assumptions of the problem until you've reframed it enough to allow these solutions to seem more "obvious".

Here's a very silly and simple example: you have an engineering task to search for an ID in a tree data structure. You may know several standard methods off the top of your head or you may look up the best performing algorithm online. Either way, the solution is the expected one.

But let's abstract the problem: Why do you need to search for an ID in a tree data structure? Do you need a tree in order to keep track of the path and the IDs you pass? If not, then why not scrap the tree completely and go with a hash map of key/value pairs? That solution is both faster and easier to implement, but it only occurs if you think about the goal of the problem instead of the problem itself. You can abstract it even further and ask whether IDs are required at all, and if they aren't what other solutions could be used to accomplish the same goal. This is a very, very simple example but the idea can be applied to varying degrees in any problem, and kind of comes to the idea of finding first principles in physics.

Agree with this approach. I had a manager tell me once that managers think differently than engineers and I asked him to explain. He gave the example of asking an engineer how to turn on a light bulb. The engineer (me) would/did say to flip the light switch. He said that manager would ask why do you need to turn on the light bulb? What is it in the room that needs to be illuminated? Maybe your real purpose is to figure out if there is a certain item in the room, and there is a better way to figure that out than turning on the switch.

As an engineer, I am aware that my mind often plots the shortest path from problem to solution, without ever stopping to question the problem definition. Sometimes reframing the problem is the best way to get to a more creative solution.

I think a lot of creativity (or lack of) can come down to routine. If you follow the same routine every day, doing the same things, you get in a rut. Breaking your routine can help to get your mind into a different frame which can unlock some creativity.