Another, unconnected but cross-pollinating, project relates to open access I will always take myself on a whirlwind tour of Australian History and Neuroscience, maybe dipping in for a moment in Designland to consider Brutalist architecture and wallpaper printmaking and ultimately really doubling down on microscopy (the different shapes of balloon burst marks would make excellent taxonomical tools for classifying the countless hitherto unknown protozoa that may be found in the sediment of our deepest ocean trenches).
That way I’ll never be trapped in one terrain that might be the one burst balloons instantly conjure up (there are only so many ways you could celebrate National Eeyore Day, after all).
If it does, I’ll look on a country by country basis and so on. Whenever I am faced with a creative puzzle (say, uses for a burst balloon), I will touch down on every continent and see what’s there and whether it feels promising. So there is Science (breaking into History of Science, Human Science, Physical Sciences, etc, which then narrow all the way to the likes of different strains of poppy hybrids or subduction zones of the world), Culture, Sport, History, Geography and so on. My master memory map or whatever you want to call the sum of all your knowledge, is basically divided up into Knowledge Continents, and within each continent there are countries, and so on. I actually approach Torrance test type questions of the kind we get in the Creative Thinking World Championships in exactly this way as a deliberate strategy. One of the projects I am working on a lot at the moment is campaigning on mental health issues
#Brian eno oblique strategies screensaver trial#
It’s one of those techniques that is so self-evident you do it without thinking about it (we’re taught it in maths of course when we do trial and error, and in arithmetic, it’s a fairly useful way of calculating square and cube roots). How would you do it? The algorithm you would devise, we are told, would begin with widely spaced random positions, pick the most promising and then scatter around them, and iterate inwards thusly. Suppose you are looking for the highest point on a globe in a limited amount of time, and you can take only individual readings at a time. Let me take three things Tim talks about as illustrations On further reflection, in the moment before the “how dare you blow your trumpet” feelings hit, I did allow myself an “It’s pretty cool that I seem to have intuited my way to the best methods of doing stuff rather than, as I always figured, royally screwing myself over with self-sabotage at every turn.” The second, third, and fourth things I thought were – hmm, I’m going to have to do some serious creating to make my writing about creativity more original (but cool challenge) ouch, I should have known some of that (but yay, gaps to fill!) and, I guess that explains why I seem to do OK at creativity tests. It has felt as though Tim has crawled inside my head, extracted each of my techniques, systems, and inner infrastructures, and assigned them to different figures from the creative field. It has been what I can only call “disconcerting”. Having snagged a signed copy at his talk earlier in the week, I have spent my commutes reading Tim Harford’s Messy.
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