C R E A T I V E

 Plugin Image

Server does not support image manipulation.

Q U A R T E T S

(See reinventing invention, four-fold reasoning, sympoiesis and other keywords)

 Plugin Image

Server does not support image manipulation.

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

1. What is it NOT? - it is not a design method. Nor is it a problem-solving tool. 
2. What does it do? - it turns existing assets & resources into an abundance of new & intertwined synergies.  
3. How does it work? - it pluralises the act of bisociation at an optimum (i.e. manageable) scale. 
4. Outcomes? - unforeseen opportunities and/or new ways of thinking (e.g 'problems' may become 'assets').
5. Who are its beneficiaries? - users of the Creative Quartet system, their communities, and/or others.
6. 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?

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 individual '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. Arthur Koestler argued that all creative thinking is the result of some kind of bisociation.
6. If we are lucky, the outcome of the combination is a new asset, or synergy.
7. This combinatorial process is, therefore, less a focus on things and more upon the relations between them. 
8. 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)

 Plugin Image

Server does not support image manipulation.

we struggle to coordinate the abundance of

 Plugin Image

Server does not support image manipulation.

possibilities (see four-fold reasoning)

What does the graph demonstrate?

1. As the number of 'things' increases, the number of possible synergies increases exponentially.
2. 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

 Plugin Image

Server does not support image manipulation.

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

1. Imagine that every clink represents a relationship between 2 of the 4 (i.e. the quartet)
2. In a duet we would hear 1 clink.
3. In a trio we would hear 3 clinks
4. 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

TIME	X	MEETING	Y	WHAT HAPPENS
Session 1	A	1	B	The creative meeting between A & B
Plugin Image Server does not support image manipulation.	C	2	D	takes place at the same time as C & D
Plugin Image Server does not support image manipulation.
Session 2	A	3	C	The creative meeting between A & C
Plugin Image Server does not support image manipulation.	B	4	D	takes place at the same time as B & D
Plugin Image Server does not support image manipulation.
Session 3	C	5	B	The creative meeting between C & B
Plugin Image Server does not support image manipulation.	D	6	A	takes place at the same time as D & A.

 

 Plugin Image

Server does not support image manipulation.

 Plugin Image

Server does not support image manipulation.

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.