Creative Propulsion
Serendipity in Context
When I worked at Josephmark, I was involved in the creation of a website for the Asia-Pacific Design Library (APDL) - Design Online.
The brief for the website was to create an online companion to the physical library, co-located within the State Library of Queensland. It was to become an online meeting of general public, design industry professionals and academics; a place to create new knowledge and build dialogue in and around the burgeoning Asia-Pacific Design community.
A strong influence for the design of the APDL was the notion of serendipty. The chance encounter of new ideas by blurring the boundaries of what a library is considered to be.
Asia-Pacific Design Library (State Library of Queensland, Brisbane Australia)
The physical layout of APDL doesn’t clearly designate positions for books in the same way that the Dewey system does and the five discipline areas— Fashion, Design Thinking, Public Places, Communication, Better Living— are intentionally left without boundaries to blur the line even further.
As we developed some of the features and functionality for Design Online we quickly realised that while serendipity is a nice concept; it is often over-romanticised without giving proper attention to why it seems so amazing.
What gives serendipity its power is not simply the combination of fun and some abstract sense of creativity. Serendipity is powerful (and naturally rare) because it manages to inexplicably leverage context. Somehow giving us just what we need, without even having to ask, in just the right place for it all to make sense.
Essentially, serendipity is the lightbulb moment.
Harnessing these nice moments of inspiring connection between ideas requires us to give greater attention to how we got to our current position in the first place.Similarly, improving the general understanding that innovation (in design, and in all areas of human endeavour) is more of a process, building on work that came before us, is something that we should all aspire to.
We eventually settled on Creative Propulsion (Sternberg, 1999) as a foundational theory for the functionality of Design Online.
Shawn White talks about what is essentially an operationalisation of Creative Propulsion in his Medium post ‘A Meaningul Context Web’
This context could be identified/correlated with a relational choice identifier such as “in comparison to”, “in contrast to”, “inspired by”, ”in addition to”
Design Online allows users to cite articles from the website, or external sources as a starting point for their ideas. They are then encouraged to think critically about how this original starting point has influenced their thinking, and whether this new material is for, against or a sythensis of the original material. This is a simplification of the Creative Propulsion model, which proposes 7 discrete ways in which creative works propel a domain by making changes to it.
Using these modes of domain propulsion to understand how knowledge has evolved over time will not just give us greater insight into the role each and every thinker who came before us played; it will become an essential skill for the effective contextualisation of the exponentially expanding web of content in our world.
Context in the web is nothing new
In 1960, Project Xanadu was founded by Ted Nelson.
Although it appears to have suffered a fate akin to Betamax, beaten to fame and mass adoption by the Berners-Lee world-wide-web, the concept itself is something quite spectacular.
[UPDATE] Xanadu is out of ‘vapourware’ stage
(June, 2014)
http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/06/xanadu-released-after-54-years/
What would our world of interconnected knowledge be like, if we could know how every piece of new knowledge was formed, by whom it was influenced and with whom its legacy is continued?
What power would could from truly understanding the emergence of knowledge?
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