Why we are building Seenapse

The role of the internet in creativity

The web is for “inter-creativity” — to allow all of us to be creative together —
we aren’t there yet.

— Tim Berners-Lee

We come from a creative background. We are big believers in the power of human ingenuity to inspire us, to solve our greatest challenges, to make a change for the better.

And a few years back we noticed something was missing on the Internet.

We have this fantastic, ever growing, always accesible repository of human knowledge. Also, as a meeting place it’s magical: we get to know people that otherwise we never would, and we even get to talk to them, discuss ideas with them.

As such, the internet should be like the English Coffeehouses of the 17th and 18th centuries, but global, in steroids. A place where an ecology of ideas can bloom and basically never stop growing, exponentially. And it is, to a certain extent, but we think that it hasn’t fulfilled that potential yet.

We believe this is due to the way the web is organised, and the way that search engines work. Basically, the web is modelled as a library — everything is classified, mostly thematically. Even with the ability to tag things with multiple keywords, or using any alternate taxonomies, we’re still incessantly classifying stuff. And search engines are designed to bring you the most popular, obvious results. Classification, and finding exactly what you’re looking for, are great for research purposes, but they’re terrible for creativity.

Creativity is about connecting things that weren’t connected before. When things are organised thematically, it follows that their creative potential is basically zero, because those things are already connected or are adjacent to each other. Very few surprises, unique insights, or Eureka moments will come from looking at those things.

We have to do the work ourselves of finding novel connections, using the stuff we know, juggling with it in our head. We do this through mental associations, intuition, lateral thinking, brainstorming. But in all cases, we can only connect the things that we know (or the group knows, if brainstorming with other people).

Looking at the internet and its possibilities we asked ourselves: shouldn’t there exist a tool that can assist during the process of ideation, that taps into these connections that we all have in our heads? The basic unit has been there since the beginning — the hyperlink — but it has been used, mostly, to build a megalibrary, not to document our vast network of potentially useful associations.

Note the emphasis in potentially — if the value of those associations has already been established, then it moves to the territory of documented, concrete ideas, which is what we already have aplenty on the web.

What we’re trying to build with Seenapse is a place in which we can share our mental associations, globally, so we can use each other’s diverse knowledge and experience to connect things we couldn’t possibly connect on our own.

To think with other people’s heads, as we like to say.

Obviously, there are many different ways to accomplish the objective of making the internet more creative-friendly, but this is the one we believe in, and that we think we can contribute with. Let’s see how it works ☺