"Free association" is a term used in psychiatry to describe when a patient relates whatever comes to mind in real time. Outside of psychiatry, the practice can be used creatively to generate ideas, such as artistic ideas or business ideas. One popular type of free association exercise is freewriting, where a person writes ideas on a piece of paper as they occur. A similar type of exercise is to state ideas out loud into a voice recorder. After a free-association session, it can be a good idea to organize the ideas into categories or groups.
One powerful way of generating new ideas is to think of things from the perspective of another person. Shifting your perspective to that of a person in a different country or time period can give you valuable insights into questions of culture and society. This can be done with a pen and paper by starting a page with the phrase "If I were in country/era 'x,' " and continuing down the page with a list of things you would do if you were living under different conditions. A slightly different approach is to read books from a different place or time and take notes about the culture, society or economy.
Brainstorming does not have to be a solitary activity. In fact, some of the best ideas are generated in group discussions. The value of group discussion in brainstorming is that when any one group member speaks up to contribute an idea, other group members may jump in and provide ideas that would not otherwise have occurred to the first person. An audio recorder may be used to capture group brainstorming sessions for use later. Alternatively, ideas from a brainstorming session may be copied on paper.
Decomposition means breaking something down into smaller parts. Decomposition may involve breaking a concept down into smaller concepts and tracking the concept hierarchy using images, or depicting the relationships between concepts using a Venn diagram. The best way to break down or "unpack" a concept is to draw out a map linking the subsidiary concepts to the main concept, regardless of particular depiction strategy used.