CREATIVE QUARTETS

making the genre of invention six-times more productive

Why Do We 'Design' When We Could (re)Combine?

1. It is likely that mankind's first attempts at 'design thinking' was in the shaping of single objects.
2. The traditional act of 'invention' can be seen as a genre of focusing on possible new 'gadgets'/'widgets'/Apps etc.
3. Traditionally, humans are accustomed to manufacturing these new products from virgin materials.
4. However, in the living world, innovation more often occurs when existing assets (DNA etc) re-combine.
5. In any case, all creative thinking is the result of what Koestler called bisociation.
6. This combinatorial process therefore is less a focus on things and more upon the relations between them.
7. As relations outnumber things, a combinatorial approach could unleash an almost limitless range of novelties.

Limits to Thinking in Parallel

1. There are cognitive limits to the number of relations humans can manage effectively.
2. Indeed, humans find it increasingly hard to innovate in clusters bigger than four (c.f. the genre of invention)

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Fig. 1 - optimising the abundance of possibilities and our ability to manage them

• (see figure 1 above)

1. A quartet is six times more productive than a duet
2. This can be explained visually, using a tetrahedron
   • A tetrahedron has 4 vertices and 6 edges.
3. We can see this as a model of how there are always more relations (edges) than things (nodes).
   • (N.B. if participants are frightened by 3D geometrical forms - the glass clinking tool may work better.)
   • for fuller explanation, see John's TEDx talk)

The room is normally laid out as a flat tetrahedron



N.B. A quartet can be understood as six duets

TIME	X	MEETING	Y	Comments
Session 1	A	1	B	The creative meeting between A and B
20 mins	C	2	D	takes place at the same time as C and D.
Session 2	A	3	C	The creative meeting between A and C
20 mins	B	4	D	takes place at the same time as B and D.
Session 3	C	5	B	The creative meeting between C and B
20 mins	D	6	A	takes place at the same time as D and A.

Bibliography

• Bateson G (1979) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: E. P. Dutton
• Bohm, D., (1980), Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Boston
• Florida, R., (2002), The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life by Richard Florida today! Basic Books, New York
• Jones, H., (2007) Bisociation within Keyword-Mapping; An Aid to Writing Purposefully in Design, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp.
• Sheldrake, R. (1981), 'A New Science of Life',
• Taleb, N. N. (2007) 'The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable' 2007. New York: Random House
• Taylor, P., & Wood, J., (1997), "Mapping the Mapper", a chapter in "Computers, Communications, and Mental Models", eds. Donald Day & Diane Kovacs, Taylor & Francis, London, ISBN 0-7484-0543-7, pp. 37-44, January 1997
• Wood, J., (2005), “How Can We Design Miracles?”, introduction to “Agents of Change: A Decade of MA Design Futures”, pages 10-14, (June 1, 2005), Goldsmiths College, (Hardback), ISBN 1904158617
• Wood, J., - chapter 8 of his book Design for Micro-Utopias

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