The sound of one hand clapping

June 13, 2008 by Cynthia Sifonis.

I StumbledUpon the OneWord website yesterday. The site gives you a single word (”Daisy” or “Substance”) and you have 60 seconds to write something, anything about that one word.

Once you submit your answer, you can then review what other visitors to the site submitted for that word.

I actually thought it was a pretty creative website. Maybe it was intended to get the creative juices flowing or to help snap a person out of writer’s block. If so, it was unique in that most techniques like this to enhance creative writing or innovation have a person combine two or more random words/concepts and then explore the combination.

The idea that creativity comes about through combination of ideas has a long history. One of the first people to explore the use of conceptual combination in the development of ideas was Poincare. Of course he examined it in the context of “the genesis of mathematical creation.” Poincare reasoned that elementary concepts “collided” in the unconscious. The most fruitful combinations were those made up of disparate elements. However, combinations made from disparate elements were also those most likely to be useless. Why then are we not bombarded with a plethora of useless combinations during innovation or problem solving? Poincare believed it was because the unconscious mind engaged in a selection process only allowing the combinations with the most potential to rise to consciousness. As he stated “Invention is discernment, choice.”

There is ample evidence, both anecdotal and empirical, that combinations of disparate concepts result in creativity and innovation. Consequently, many techniques exist to use conceptual combination to enhance creativity. These include the “Random Logline Generator” for writers and Ward’s “Random Adjective Noun Combination” generator.

Some of the most creative work I have seen has come about through the random pairing of concepts. At the top of my list of creative products resulting from random conceptual combination are:

1.) The artist Mark Tansey’s use of a concept wheel to generate ideas for paintings such as “White on White“.

2.) The Nietzsche Family Circus

3.) Working video games created in response to a random name generator. The winning playable entries (created by the 3 week deadline!) included “Post-Apocalyptic Unicorn Uprising,” “Emo Harvest on The Oregon Trail” “Attack of the Banjo on the High Seas.”

Now you can see why OneWord is different. Perhaps it is designed to help people achieve creativity through tapping into the Zen of the sound of one hand clapping.

Posted in Conceptual Combination, innovation, Creativity | 1 Comment »