Using Randomness To Stimulate Creativity

As part of my Android development projects, I've recently been reading about randomness and how it can help to stimulate the creative process. I've always found randomness interesting and in some cases funny, but it also seems to be a tried and tested creativity technique. In this article I thought I'd run through a few of the concepts and resources I've come across on the subject.

Lots of writers, artists and musicians use randomness to prompt their creative efforts, and computers are offering new ways to implement random (or pseudo-random) processes. Computer programming languages are able to generate random numbers which can then be used to add a level of unpredictability to website or computing application content.

I find randomness really funny, which is why I started learning about this subject, mainly for the purpose of developing my Android Nonsense applications.

Looking for a way to automate nonsense and gibberish, I found a load of funny websites doing similar things. These applications use recognisable language structures with random elements to create comic effect. Here are some of the funnier sites I've found:

When I studied for my Masters degree in IT, I worked on a software project in which sentences were modelled as templates, with placeholders corresponding to particular parts of speech. For example, the following sentence:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Could be represented using the following placeholders:
Determiner adjective adjective noun verb preposition determiner adjective noun.

Using this idea, you can take a language template and fill words of each part of speech into the placeholder slots randomly. This process could result in the following:
A stupid big car dances on a purple hat.

The process here is a little like the game MadLibs, in which you choose words without knowing the sentence (or story) context. My idea was to make the process a little more unpredictable and to automate parts of it, rather than the user having to choose every item.

Anyway, it works because of the difference between grammar and semantics. Grammar determines (or describes) the structures that are used within a language to build sentences and clauses. Semantics on the other hand relates to meaning. Chomsky created the following sentence to illustrate the fact that a sentence can make no sense but still be grammatical:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

This is the crux of the nonsense sentence. If it was just a series of words it wouldn't be funny, but the fact that our brains recognise it as a sentence structure makes the lack of sense humorous. At the phrasal level, the concept of snowclone is also relevant. This idea relates to a category of language cliches in which a structure has interchangeable elements, for example:
The ? from Hell

Speakers of a language develop the ability to fill in blanks, an aspect of language learning analysed using Cloze Tests. This tendency to conceive of sentence structures rather than just concrete examples of language seems key to both creativity and understanding.

Creativity is a slippery topic. We describe people as creative, generally categorising some people as more creative than others. I don't know if I believe this. I've always tended to "do creative things" but I think it has more to do with habit than nature. In any case, I believe that engaging with creative tasks is not only enjoyable, but also good for mental well-being. For this reason I think it's a good idea to encourage people to stimulate their own creativity, and randomness can aid this process.

Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky touches on some related concepts. The poem, an example of Literary Nonsense, uses recognisable structures with nonsense words. Rather than each word being from a known part of speech, these words seem to be from specific parts of speech on account of the sentence structures they appear in. Interestingly, linguistic studies have shown that people often have similar ideas for what the invented words in the poem could mean.