Puppy is to dog, as colt is to . . . .
Source: Jonathan Kriz via Wikimedia Commons
Awakening our creativity with a few simple words. . . .
How much do you think creativity is something enduring and permanent that remains constant across time, that is, you either have it or you don’t? Or how much do you think creativity depends on the situation or context you are in, and so fluctuates up and down?
This is the topic of Wilma’s latest Psychology Today blog post. For more please see.
U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Dan Neely via Wikimedia Commons
Lifting and moving 100-pound sacks of coffee beans is back-breaking work. Repeatedly grasping, hoisting, and piling the sacks — heavy and awkward with their shifting contents — is a significant health issue for workers. How might the unloading of these and similar sorts of cargo be made automatic, and ease the burden on workers lugging such heavy loads?
Joining up with a colleague in an interdepartmental research center, researchers in civil and industrial engineering at the University of Pisa in Italy decided to take up this challenging problem. Specifically, they set themselves the task of developing a “gripper” that could grasp coffee sacks made of a porous material (jute), ranging in weight from 50 pounds to 170 pounds. The gripper needed to work quickly (grasping or releasing in less than 3 seconds), and without excessively tearing or damaging the jute material.
But the enterprising researchers weren’t just on the quest of a new gripper: they were using this challenge to test-drive a new “creativity support” method they were developing. Meant to help designers reach into unexplored idea territory, the multi-step method provides a structured guide for using abstraction and analogy to more effectively generate innovative design concepts.
—> For more see Wilma’s Psychology Today blog post.
We may have encountered the term “embodied cognition” in recent research showing the surprising interrelations of our minds and brains with our bodies—but here’s a twist.
How might the tuxedo and formal apparel of a violinist in a symphony orchestra detract from their freedom of movement, active expression, and basic physical comfort?
Although creating an experience of ethereal beauty, performing classical music can be sweaty work. In the words of one concert violinist after playing Berlioz’s epically passionate Symphonie Fantastique: “We were sweating through our undershirts, through our tuxedo shirts. My bow tie was completely soaked.”
Must this be in the 21st century?
By evening a concert violinist, by day an entrepreneurial Dallas businessman, Kevin Yu after his morning run found himself wondering why couldn’t formal concert garb be more like athletic wear?
That was the start of an idea whose time had surely come. Yu soon began prototyping new forms of tuxedo shirts made of fabric that was accommodating, moisture-wicking, and flexible just like his running gear. Although he tried to keep his prototypes under wraps—word soon spread and orders and requests poured in.
As Yu’s friend a Dallas Symphony Orchestra co-concertmaster mused: “You kind of wonder why it didn’t exist in the marketplace to begin with . . . A lot of us just took it for granted: that that’s the way it had to be because that’s the way it always was.”
What else in our worlds might be just like this. . . .
—> For more background and the quotations cited above see:
Michael Cooper, Taking the starch out of concert attire, The New York Times, August 18, 2015.
Suppose you need to translate technological computer terms, such as “browser” or “cache” or even “crash” into another language in which such technological terms are absent? How literal can you be—or is metaphor what is needed?
How do we convey meaning effectively when the cultural building blocks are so different?
Take this imaginative approach:
“Ibrahima Sarr, a Senegalese coder, led the translation of Firefox into Fulah, which is spoken by 20m people from Senegal to Nigeria. ‘Crash’ became hookii (a cow falling over but not dying) . . . In Malawi’s Chichewa language, which has 10m speakers, ‘cached pages’ became mfutso wa tsamba, or bits of leftover food. The windowless houses of the 440,000 speakers of Zapotec, a family of indigenous languages in Mexico, meant that computer ‘windows’ became ‘eyes.’”
The translation project is also a great example of goal synergy: “As well as bringing the linguistically excluded online, localisation may keep small languages alive.”
Analogies and metaphors are part and parcel of our communicative repertoire and we can use them more or less purposively, and more or less creatively. Metaphors and analogies are not curlicues—they are enmeshed in how we think. They are not mere ripples on the surface but currents that move the stream—and us—forward.
As we observe in our book Innovating Minds, analogies:
“are clearly important in the generation of our ideas but they can also serve several other functions in fostering positive creative change and development. Analogies enable us to use what we already know in order to better understand or grasp something that is novel or less familiar. In one study of new product development projects, 6 of 16 people interviewed explicitly noted that analogies helped to promote communication between team members, designers, and engineers during new product development. Two of the interviewees even stated that enhanced communication was the most important aspect of the analogy in the given project. The communicative and explanatory functions of analogies may prove especially pivotal in bridging between teams and individuals with quite disparate backgrounds, task priorities, and thought processes.”
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