Creative Problem Solving: Teaching a Cat High-Five

Recently, I was asked what creative problem solving meant to me. I know I’m a creative problem solver and have been told this by others, but I never stopped to think about what makes me one and, at a more basic level, what creative problem solving even means. The question sat with me for a while afterwards. As a designer, I racked my brain for times I solved a UX problem, but what came up instead was teaching my cat how to high five.

I adopted a feisty gray cat over the summer named Mako. She’s active physically and mentally. Knowing she needed a higher level of stimulation, I wanted to challenge her to learn and myself to teach some tricks that were historically reserved for dogs. After mastering “sit” and “sit pretty”, I wanted to teach her high five.

Animal training fascinates me because there’s the lack of a shared spoken language. You have to figure out a different way to teach an animal something. It’s the perfect type of problem to solve with creativity.

The first thing I did with Mako when trying to teach her high five was touching my hand to her paw and then feeding a treat. I thought that she might begin to associate hand-to-paw touching with a reward, but after a few days of trying this, it was clear that it wasn’t making a connection.

So I pivoted.

The next thing I tried was picking Mako’s paw up and holding it in my hand. I tried this a total of once as she made it incredibly clear that she was not going to tolerate me trying to force a hand hold. So I did the only other thing I could think of: I, concluding that this was too complex of a trick, gave up.

Fast forward a couple of days. I was watching Mako play with a makeshift puzzle I put together for her. It consisted of a cardboard paper towel roll, cut up into smaller sections, and standing vertically in a tupperware. Inside each mini paper towel roll, I put a few treats. On top, there were small toys like balls and mice to cover the treats.

Observe:

As I was watching, I noticed Mako using her paws to try to dig out the treats.

It clicked.

The pawing was a natural motion for her to get to the food. If I could re-create this motivation and motion on my hand, maybe we can work our way up to learn how to high five. We started with one of these mini paper towel rolls with a treat inside on my hand. As she became consistent in tapping my hand with her paw, I eventually removed the paper towel roll, then the treat, and was left with a low-five situation I could work with:

From there, I gradually raised my hand to a higher height and voila!—that is how my cat learned how to high five.

Thinking back on this, I realized that creative problem solving is a multi-step skill that involves observing, experimenting, and re-purposing. You first observe to see what you have to work with, whether it’s a certain type of behavior, certain materials, certain components of a design system. This helps you see what kinds of behaviors come naturally to someone, what kinds of visual language your audience already understands, etc. It’s much harder to create a new experience or product if it doesn’t incorporate components that your user can already process.

If we look at the evolution of cell phones, for example, there are elements in each evolutionary step that tie into previous versions.

The dial rotary/pad is the key, consistent visual language over time to communicate that the function of this item is a phone.

Image Credit: https://talkingpointz.com/the-history-of-the-dial-pad/

Once you determine what behaviors, components or language you have to work with, this is when the experimenting begins. Through experimentation, you can successfully re-purpose these pieces, put them in a new context, and create new experiences and products that people can easily understand, learn, and use.