C R E A T I V E Q U A R T E T S
(See reinventing invention, four-fold reasoning, sympoiesis and other keywords)
making the genre of invention six-times more productive
The Creative Quartet: a TEDx talk by John Wood (2010)
What Are Creative Quartets?
- a re-invention of the genre of invention.
- an opportunity-finding methodology
- What is it NOT? - it is not a design method. Nor is it a problem-solving tool.
- What does it do? - it turns existing assets & resources into an abundance of new & intertwined synergies.
- How does it work? - it pluralises the act of bisociation at an optimum (i.e. manageable) scale.
- Outcomes? - unforeseen opportunities and/or new ways of thinking (e.g 'problems' may become 'assets').
- Who are its beneficiaries? - users of the Creative Quartet system, their communities, and/or others.
- What are its limitations? - users may find it hard, or even impossible, to attain predictable outcomes.
Why Do We 'Design' When We Could (re)Combine?
- It is likely that mankind's first attempts at 'design thinking' was in the shaping of single objects.
- The traditional act of 'invention' can be seen as a genre of focusing on individual 'gadgets'/'widgets'/Apps etc.
- Traditionally, humans are accustomed to manufacturing these new products from virgin materials.
- However, in the living world, innovation more often occurs when existing assets (DNA etc) re-combine.
- Arthur Koestler argued that all creative thinking is the result of some kind of bisociation.
- If we are lucky, the outcome of the combination is a new asset, or synergy.
- This combinatorial process is, therefore, less a focus on things and more upon the relations between them.
- As relations outnumber things, a combinatorial approach could unleash an almost limitless range of novelties.
Limits to Thinking in Parallel
- There are cognitive limits to the number of relations humans can manage effectively.
- Indeed, humans find it increasingly hard to innovate in clusters bigger than four (c.f. the genre of invention)
we struggle to coordinate the abundance of
possibilities (see four-fold reasoning)
What does the graph demonstrate?
- As the number of 'things' increases, the number of possible synergies increases exponentially.
- But the human capacity to think about complex combinations falls off rapidly above 4.
So a quartet is six times more productive than a duet
a quartet shown flat
This can be explained in 3 dimensions with a tetrahedron
(see four-fold reasoning)
A tetrahedron has 4 vertices and 6 edges
- Euler noted that in all polygons that the edges always outnumber the vertices by 2.
- We can use edges and vertices to represent things and their relationships.
- This is an auspicious finding, as relations are always more valuable than things.
A version for blind people
- Some people find it hard to think about geometrical forms, so a glass clinking experiment may be preferable
- Imagine that every clink represents a relationship between 2 of the 4 (i.e. the quartet)
- In a duet we would hear 1 clink.
- In a trio we would hear 3 clinks
- In a quartet we would hear 6 clinks
A Creative Quartets workshop
We normally arrange the room as a flattened tetrahedron
invited guests included Prof. John Chris Jones
ORGANISING THE WORKSHOPS
Six duets conducted in simultaneous pairs
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) [tiki-download_file.php?fileId=114|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., (2022). Creative Quartets: Reinventing Invention. In Metadesigning Designing in the Anthropocene (pp. 95-107). Routledge.
- 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., (2017) - chapter 8 of Design for micro-utopias: making the unthinkable possible. Routledge.