Reinventing Invention

extracted from John Wood's chapter in Metadesigning Designing in the Anthropocene 2022.
(see other articles, creative quartets defined and other keywords)

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man”.

George Bernard Shaw (1903)

Introduction

The circular economy was a great idea, but modern humans struggle to think beyond the summative flatland of individual products, services and experiences. Designers are still trained to serve an anthropocentric economy that demands user-centred products rather than regenerative systems. One way to create abundance outside the extraction and disposal paradigm is to create novel synergies that will orchestrate a global synergy of synergies. This would require the co-creators to cultivate reciprocal empathies that encourage interpersonal synergies.

The myth of invention

Does inventiveness stem from natural talent or can it be acquired through education? The myth of the mad inventor still lurks in the popular imagination, but perhaps it is obsolete, given the need for a paradigm change, rather than yet another new ‘widget’. This article outlines what I call the creative quartets framework and explains how it can deliver multiple abundances when compared with the Enlightenment understanding of invention as a solo act of ‘genius’. In his 1903 play Man and Superman , George Bernard Shaw satirised this idea. In one line of the play, for example, a character says, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man”.

Invention or Revelation?

In many Hollywood movies, the inventor saves the world with a single insight, widget or ‘silver bullet’. Admittedly, creativity is vitally important, but we cannot ‘invent’ ourselves out of this mess. We need to re-evaluate what we mean by ‘creativity’ and, its subgenre, ‘invention’. This also means challenging the egoism behind ‘user-centred’ design. Some critics blame the Anthropocene on ‘demiurgic’ impulses within design. In this context, the ‘inventor as lone genius’ is emblematic of our presumption as a species. It would be good to reinvent inventiveness as the faculty by which humans adapt to the living world, rather than the other way around.

Divine Revelation

Before the Renaissance, ‘creativity’ - in the modern sense - was virtually unthinkable, if not blasphemous. The idea that a brain could harbour original thoughts seems not to have occurred to Plato, as everything was believed to have been ‘created’ by God. This implied that human ideas were merely shallow copies of things prefigured in Nature. It took until 1689 for someone, in this case John Locke, to speculate that “the mind can furnish the understanding with ideas”. This must have astonished some of his contemporaries. On the other hand, the Christian idea of ‘epiphany’ had long been used to describe a sudden, world-changing flash of enlightenment that we may refer to as a light bulb or eureka moment.

Invention or Revelation?

The apocryphal story of Archimedes (287–212 BC) describes a moment of inspiration when his body mass displaced the bathwater. But was this a creative act or an observational insight? Traditional scientists might argue that Archimedes simply noticed a fact of nature, rather than inventing anything. Either way, the story epitomises the event as a single moment in space and time. As a myth, it was important in implying that human insight has dominion over Nature. The modern idea of the ‘genius’ subsequently emerged as a natural stage within the rise of humanism. Although St. Augustine (AD 354–430) saw the human act of ‘creation’ as inspired by God, he also coupled it to the notion of earthly ‘talent’. This implies that God chooses to endow divine powers of insight to a chosen individual. This is not too dissimilar to the idea that creativity is a rare gift, possessed by extraordinary individuals.

Genius Invents Silver Bullet

Given our evolutionary history, it is possible that our skills in shaping individual products are deeply embedded in how we think. As a species, Hominans have uniquely large thumbs and can grip things in a variety of ways. This anatomical peculiarity may have sharpened our ability to focus onto hand-sized objects, one by one. We have been digging up hard minerals for a very long time. Indeed, our cognitive capacity for visualising and shaping things (e.g. designing tools and weapons) probably evolved over the last 3.4 million years. Perhaps this is why the association between handcrafting and particular individuals seems natural. On the other hand, the use of shiny minerals as tokens may have encouraged the acquisition of skills that enabled us to fetishise numbers as monetary wealth.

Relational Thinking

The history of industrialisation has tended to highlight critical resources as quantities (e.g. as particular cash crops, money and oil). These systems perpetuate the myth that abundance is synonymous with monogeneity and quantity. However, no single asset, material or entity has any value on its own; therefore, abundance can only be created by combining different things appropriately. It is strange that this sounds eccentric. Rather than valuing the collective imagination and the relationships that are needed to make it work, our political systems continue to make us focus onto individual leaders and their specific contributions.

Celebrity and Ingenuity

During the Enlightenment, for example, thinkers were fascinated by the notion of individual ‘genius’, rather than noticing the way that paradigms of belief are obstacles to change. As a result, infl uential thinkers, such as David Hume (1711–1776) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) characterised the genius as a ‘loner’ who was so extraordinarily self-styled and unfathomable that he ( sic ) would struggle to adapt to the ‘normal’ world around him. In announcing that his life was more important than his art, celebrities, such as Lord Byron (1788–1824), pioneered the myth that personal eccentricity may be a hallmark of brilliance. This has morphed into the acquired narcissism of celebrity culture. Despite the rise of feminism and brain science, the myth of genius is not yet dead.

Corporate Versions of Creativity

It is hard to find a clear boundary between the inventor as eccentric clown and what, in the 1880s, Frederick Nietzsche described as Der Übermensch (i.e. a kind of transcendent super-being). This can be seen as an attempt to awaken society from the twin yokes of fate and religion. Today, however, we know more about the dangers of exceptionalism and the political risks this can pose. In the last few decades, creativity has attracted new popularity for its catalytic effect on profits, growth and urban regeneration.

Daring to Be Wise

In effect, creativity has become almost synonymous with individuality and freedom on a corporate as well as social level. For some, the charisma of inventors, such as Nikola Tesla or Hedy Lamarr, vindicates the idea that creativity is the gift of special individuals. Today, the myth of the ‘remote genius’ has become a handy backstory used for selling joyrides into space or futuristic electric cars. The tendency to exoticise self-styled creatives has also migrated to inanimate things. Renault named one of their cars ‘The Picasso’ and the AI industry is currently claiming that some of their disembodied algorithms are creative. In 1997, Apple introduced their now-famous slogan ‘Think Different’. This may have been inspired by Immanuel Kant’s reflections on the Enlightenment maxim ‘dare to be wise’ which was likely to have been borrowed, in turn, from the Roman poet Horace.

Designing by (Re)Combining

As I said at the start of the chapter, the idea of exploring relationships, rather than things may seem less natural to designers than to managers. Indeed, the idea of cultivating relations , rather than shaping things is implicit in the word entrepreneur but not designer . Metadesigners may need to choose between the two metaphors, given the political, ethical and functional importance of co-creativity. Arthur Koestler argued that all creative acts are bisociative in that they take place as a combinatorial process. He envisages the moment when two seemingly unconnected contexts or ‘matrices of experience’ form a new relationship and acquire a shared meaning or purpose. This method sometimes delivers novel outcomes and, or, spontaneous laughter.

The Value of Synergy

One reason for embracing Koestler’s approach is that there are always more relations than things. If we count the number of nouns in a particular region of time and space they would always be outnumbered by the number of possible verbs and the relationships they imply between and among them. As collaboration is useful, every relationship represents a potential synergy, in addition to those between the collaborators themselves. This offers more opportunities than the winner-loser paradigm normalised in genres of choice or debate. It also offers a more convivial way to manage invention and innovation. At a metadesign level of thinking, our primary asset is, therefore, difference rather than quantity. Many synergies are qualitative, as in the culinary flavours produced by blending. For example, kitchen salt is the result of a synergistic combination. Salt is an edible substance made from the poisonous chemicals sodium and chlorine.

Mathematical Implications

The word synergy derives from the Greek word synergos (συνεργός), simply meaning “working together”. So why is it difficult to describe synergies in more detail? One reason is that modern (Western) grammar tends to divide the world into separate nouns, rather than dynamic conjunctions. Of course, it is easier to count on things, as they promise predictability. Buckminster Fuller defined synergy as “. . . the behaviour of whole systems unpredicted by the behaviour of their parts taken separately”. Perhaps it is a mistake to see evolution as a succession of anatomical design improvements, rather than as Nature’s quest for new synergies.

Beyond Number

Although synergies exist all around us, most go unnoticed. Nonetheless, we can seek them because they are free bonuses that derive from combining assets that may already exist. It is unfortunate, therefore, that arithmetic was designed to deny the existence of synergy. This is not the case in biology, where symbiotic and synergistic relations are understood. Whereas the traditional arithmetical operations (i.e. addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponentiation and the extraction of roots) reveals a world of bounded certainty, many synergies exist in a domain that resists calculation. Nonetheless, we might see synergies as opportunities which, by definition, are incomplete until they are actualised in some form or other.

The Creative Duet

(See creative quartets article). If we accept Koestler’s theory that all creativity is combinatorial, we can reimagine invention as the result of combination, rather than something that emerges from a single point in the brain. In principle, whether the combination takes place within one brain; from several parts of a brain; or from between different things, ideas, viewpoints or people in a team, makes no difference. There is, therefore, a parallel between cooperative innovation 12 and sexual recombination (i.e. what is colloquially called sexual reproduction). In each case, two parent factors combine to create a new (i.e. third) outcome that will be different from each. This is not to underestimate the ingenuity of individual inventors but to remind us that bisociating in pairs encourages participants to work together in a non-adversarial way that builds mutual trust.

Figure 1

Creative Polygons

Why do we limit the creative act to a duet when simple mathematics shows that a quartet can deliver six times more benefits? My concept of the creative quartet was inspired by Leonhard Euler’s law of 1752 that applies to the geometry of polyhedra (see figure 1). Euler noticed that the number of vertices (V) plus the number of faces (F) equals the number of edges plus two (E + 2). If we think of the vertices (i.e. V) as economic assets and see the relationships between them as edges (i.e. E), we see the potential profit (i.e. P = n + 2) when inventing in clusters, rather than in disconnected, one-off events.

Creative Quartets

If Euler’s chart (Figure 7.1) is used to represent existing assets as vertices (V) and the edges (E) denote the relationships between them, this is a useful way to look for hidden synergies. Notably, the triangle delivers only a ‘’+1’’ bonus because flatland has fewer dimensions (i.e. a triangle exists as three vertices and three relations). Three has remained a popular number in the West, perhaps because it works well in storytelling. However, in synergy terms, four is twice as useful. If we discount the triangle, Figure 7.1 also shows that there is a greater relative profit for small polygons.

The Tetrahedron

The idea that a quartet is six times more productive or synergistic than a duet is easily deduced visually from a tetrahedron. Euler’s law illustrates the general truth that there are always more relations (edges) than things (nodes).

The Form of the Tetrahedron

A tetrahedron is a polyhedron with four triangular faces, three of which meet at each vertex. It has four vertices and six edges. The tetrahedral model, therefore, offers

Figure 7.1 The creative act as depicted with more than two ‘parents’

a visual framework of thinking that supports complex (i.e. manifold) innovations.

There are at least four reasons why four is an auspicious number within metadesign.

1. The tetrahedron is the simplest geometrical representation of a cell.
2. The tetrahedron is more ‘conscious’ than more complex polygons (see Chapter 10).
3. The tetrahedron implies a non-hierarchical set of possible relations.
4. The tetrahedra can be used to map ideas in an optimally mnemonic way.

Thinking in Four Dimensions

Four is the lowest number in which the sum of its relations is bigger than itself. When represented as a tetrahedron, the four nodes have no hierarchy or sequential significance. This is not true of a list of four items that exists as a sequence of successive or iterative steps, as when there is a hierarchical top and bottom or a start and end point. Similarly, a square has fewer relations than a tetrahedron even though it has the same number of vertices (i.e. four). Nor for the same reason is quadrant diagrams tetrahedral.

Whereas squares and quadrants exist in two dimensions, tetrahedra only make sense in a world with a minimum of three dimensions. Here, the third dimension may represent either space or time or, indeed, anything you wish to think about.

Beyond the Quartet

We can remind ourselves that parties, recipes and designs work better with the optimum number of ingredients. While too many will confuse us, too few will omit opportunities that may become vital to the mix. This is why innovation in complex situations (e.g. teams and communities) can easily

Figure 7.2 A tetrahedron

become difficult to comprehend. Often, the ingredients are too subtle or complex to conform to the familiar rules and shapes of language. While thinking in fours may not always show us how things really are, it can inspire us to work beyond the thinkable.

Thinking in More Dimensions

A nice way to explain the relational (rather than geometrical) logic of the tetrahedron is to imagine four guests at a party, each carrying a glass of wine (see Figure  7.3). Ask yourself how many clinks you will have heard when all four guests have clinked glasses with the other three. ( Try it with real wine if your maths is as slow as mine.) The answer is six clinks, even if they do not happen all at the same time. This is because there are four relations implied in a square but six in a tetrahedron. This is important when we are able to see relationships as opportunities, rather than as de facto evidence of an existing status quo.

What Makes the Quartet Auspicious?

By pluralising the act of bisociation at an optimum (i.e. manageable) scale, we can obtain the natural profit that always delivers n+2 relationships, where n is the number of discrete assets. This might suggest that we should look to combining very many things in order to increase the number of possible outcomes. However, the human mind struggles to visualise more than four interdependent entities at once. This estimate is low by 20th-century standards, when many believed that the average person could conceptualise the magic number of 7 (plus or minus 2) interdependent relations at once.

Figure 7.3 Visualising the quartet in both time and space

Quantum Reasoning

Cognitive Sweet Spot

In 1949, Richard Buckminster Fuller claimed that the mind is tetrahedral. It is tempting to link this with the fact that humans are quadrupeds or that brain research shows cognitive differences between the left and right hemispheres, frontal and anterior lobes of the brain. However Fuller derived his hunch, he may have been correct at a pragmatic level, if not in a literal or biological sense. Four appears to be an optimal working number 16 as there is a cognitive sweet spot between 3 and 5 (see Figure 7.4). We found that in many cases, the creative process can be juggled as a set of ‘paired’ tasks 17 .

Relational Arithmetic

In design teams (see Chapter 13), the idea of creating synergies by combining things implies that good working relationships deliver more than we put into them. But this appears to defy arithmetical logic. How can you account for getting out more than 100% of what you put in? However, when we analyse the mathematical ratios between the number of team members and the number of their working relationships, the apparent anomaly begins to make sense.

• In a team of eight, each team member is responsible for 25% of all relations
• In a team of four, each team member is responsible for 50% of all relations

Figure 7.4 Optimising the abundance of opportunity with our cognitive capacity

• In a team of three, each team member is responsible for 66.6% of all relations
• In a team of two, each team member is responsible for 100% of all relations

These figures are obtained by counting the number of relationships to which any one team member is a part then comparing it with the total number of relationships within the whole team. What this reminds us is that the contribution of each individual participant is more important than we think. It also tells us that a participant’s destructive capacity power is usually more potent than their creative influence. For example, where an affirmative and optimistic participant is working closely with a hostile or obstructive colleague, it is likely that the outcome will be suboptimal, rather than synergistic in the constructive sense.

The Tetrahedron in Learning and Assessment

Here (Figure 7.5) is a much-simplified schematic model of the Relational Learning and

Evaluation Framework I developed at Goldsmiths University of London (1995–2015).

In this system, learners are encouraged to assign relational aspects of their learning situation to the letters and numbers on the tetrahedron (see Figure 7.5). Key to this concept is that learners must create, manage and account for each of the ten aspects of their tetrahedron. This means acquiring a more entrepreneurial and ethical (i.e. entredonneurial) sense of responsibility for their whole learning framework and outcome.

For example, they may denote the following:

A.— The learner’s (future/aspirational) role (e.g. as expert designer or consultant)
B.— Artefacts, propositions or recommendations created for C in the context of D

Figure 7.5 Learning/assessment tetrahedron

C.— A reader nominated by the learner (e.g. trainee or potential client/employer)
D.— Bigger implications (e.g. global/universal context) relevant to A, B and C
1.— The learner’s description of how s/he sees the relationship between A and B
2.— The learner’s description of how s/he sees the relationship between A and C
3.— The learner’s description of how s/he sees the relationship between B and C
4.— The learner’s description of how s/he sees the relationship between A and D
5.— The learner’s description of how s/he sees the relationship between C and D
6.— The learner’s description of how s/he sees the relationship between B and D

Creative Quartet Workshops

When applying the same numerical principles within a managerial context, we found that a good way to organise Creative Quartet workshops is to train the participants to work together as creative duets. We therefore run three sessions, each with two simultaneous duets, before swapping partners (see later). The method works well with two shuffled stacks of pre-prepared cards. These can be generated with a previous workshop that asks the group to list the following:

1. Some key assets that are valued within the organisation
2. Some notable obstacles or current problems that it faces
3. Some key values and assets within the locality and/or its community
4. Some notable obstacles or current problems that it faces

A very brief synopsis of each answer is written on a card, and all the cards are put into one pack and shuffled, in order to mix up positive and negative assets. The pack is divided into four, one for each quartet member. When the duet sessions start, each participant turns over the top card and reads it to her partner. The duet’s purpose is to

help participants to combine in a non-adversarial way. A facilitator will invite them to imagine what the combination of these two card texts might deliver. One of our clients (senior managers of a FTSE 100 company) reported finding more than 50 unforeseen

Figure 7.6 Scheduling the six meetings as three simultaneous duet sessions

assets within the whole organisation. One way to achieve effective outcomes is to tell participants that the whole process should deliver at least six outcomes. This can produce specific outcomes that could benefi t each of six recipients (e.g. client, producer, local community, education system, local biodiversity and energy systems).

The Art School as a Creative Quartet

In reimagining the Art School, Figure 7.7 denotes four types of reasoning that can act as a template for setting up faculties and departments. These four key virtues of the Art School tradition (Head, Heart, Hand and Humour) are interconnected by the six relationships that might inspire the forming of new and complementary departments. The idea of Humour may seem strange, but it sits at the very nexus of the creative act.

Beyond the Quartet

In describing the creative quartet, I have simplified everything for explanatory reasons. In reality, although synergies are particular kinds of relation, not all relationships can easily be noticed and applied as useful synergies. Figure  7.8 (later) is a sketch of some of the numerous technical synergies that make the bicycle wheel such an impressive design. One bicycle wheel can withstand the weight of up to 700 identical wheels because its synergies synergise with each other to create a synergy-of-synergies.

Figure 7.7 Reconciling four modes of reasoning

Notes

1. Landry, C., 2012. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators . Routledge.
2. Frank Gehry is famously quoted as saying (in 2005) “I don’t do context”. This sentiment implies that one’s design is more important than adapting to the world.
3. Phillips, J., 2012. Relentless Innovation: What Works, What Doesn’t-and What That Means for Your Business . McGraw-Hill.
4. Florida, R., 2002, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life by Richard Florida Today! New York: Basic Books
5. Du Sautoy, M., 2019. The Creativity Code . Harvard University Press.
6. Kant, I., 2013. An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ . Penguin UK
7. Koestler, A., 1964. The Act of Creation . London: Pan Piper.
8. Wood, J., 2017. From product design to relational design: Adding ‘jeong’to the metadesigner’s vocabulary. In Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design (pp. 502–513). Routledge.
9. Fuller, R. B., 1975. “Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking”, in Collaboration with E.J. Applewhite . Introduction and contribution by Arthur L. Loeb. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc.
10. Corning, P., 2003. Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind . Cambridge University Press.
11. Feynman, R. P., 1965. The Character of Physical Law . Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
12. van Nieuwenhuijze, O. & Wood, J., 2006. Synergy & Sympoiesis in the Writing of Joint
Papers, International Journal of Computing Anticipatory Systems , edited by Daniel M. Dubois, published by the Centre for Hyperincursive Anticipation in Ordered Systems, Liège, Belgium, Vol. 10, pp. 87–102, August, ISSN 1373–541.
13. When applied to collective enterprise, Leonhard Euler's formula for polygons (1751) demonstrates that an enterprising quartet of participants has six times the number of relations than an enterprising duet. And each relationship has the potential to be applied as a useful
synergy. By focusing onto the relations, rather than the participants we may stumble upon unforeseen synergies.
14. Miller, George A., 1956. The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information, The Psychological Review , Vol. 63, pp. 81–97.

Figure 7.8 Synergies-of-synergies in the design of a bicycle wheel, Creative Quartets 107
15. Fuller, R. B., 1949. “Total Thinking” , reprinted in “Ideas and Integrities: A  Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure” (1969), Ed. Robert W. Marks, Englewood Cli  s, N.J.: Prentice-Hall
16. Cowan, N., 2001. The Magical Number 4 in Short-Term Memory: A  Reconsideration of Mental Storage Capacity, Behavioural and Brain Sciences , Vol. 24, pp. 87–114 Cambridge University Press Copyright ©2001 Cambridge University Press, doi: 10.1017/S0140525X01003922. Published online by Cambridge University Press 30 October 2001.
17. Klingberg, Torkel, 2009. The Overfl owing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory . Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 7, 8. ISBN 0195372883.