The Hammock Papers: Tools.

21 April 2012

Tools.

ArtScience® is a Big Idea whose time has come. First coined over thirty years ago by the artist/scientist Todd Siler and recently reinvented by the scientist/artist David Edwards, the term refers to the integration of scientific and aesthetic concerns and processes in wholistic enterprise. Like any galvanizing notion, artscience has been preparing to break through for many years. We like to think that our book Sparks of Genius (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) has had some small part in that preparation. Here's how ...

Nearly 30 years ago, Bob set out to research how great scientists discover. Before the scientific method kicks in, before equations and theories have been formulated, what were their rules of thumb? More to the point, were these tacit procedures something the rest of us could model and learn? In 1989, Bob pulled together all the information he had uncovered into his book, Discovering: Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge. With a nod to C. H. Waddington and his pioneering book Tools of Thought, which focused on statistical, graphical, and related forms of thinking, Bob laid out a number of other "tools" required for creative scientific thinking. Scientists, he had found, referred over and again to mental skills such as visualizing or analogizing, pattern forming or playacting or, for that matter, playing.

We quickly found that whether the individuals we studied were artists like Picasso or physicists like Richard Feynman, whether they composed sonatas or invented machines or discovered molecular structures, they all made implicit use of the same set of imaginative skills. Some more than others were more apt to address these skills explicitly, nevertheless across fields definitions were remarkably similar. This commonality was the genesis of the thirteen thinking tools that we explored as a set in Sparks of Genius.

The Thirteen Thinking Tools ...

1. Observing - honing all the senses to perceive acutely;
2. Imaging - creating mental images using any or all senses;
3. Abstracting - eliminating all but one essential characteristic of a complex thing;
4. Recognizing patterns - perceiving similarities in structures or properties of different things;
5. Forming patterns - creating or discovering new ways to organize things;
6. Analogizing - discovering functional similarities between structurally different things;
7. Body thinking - "reasoning" with muscles, muscle memory, gut feelings, and emotional states; extending bodily sensitivities through tools and instruments; feeling with body how non-self things or systems function;
8. Empathizing - playacting or "becoming the thing" one studies, be it animate or inanimate;
9. Dimensional thinking - translating between two and three (or more) dimensions, for instance, between a blue-print and an invention; to scale-up or scale down; to alter perceptions of space and time;
10. Modeling - mentally or physically creating a simplified or miniaturized analog of a complex thing in order to test or modify its properties;
11. Playing - undertaking a goal-less activity for fun; incidentally developing skill, knowledge and intuition;
12. Transforming - translating between communicative modes, e.g. "hearing" how an equation sounds or "dancing" the logic of an experiment), thus using any or all tools for thinking in a serial or integrated manner; for example, using analogies to image a new invention, creating a model, playing with it, tinkering with scale, and then translating the optimized invention into drawings;
13. Synthesizing - knowing in multiple ways simultaneously -- bodily, intuitively and subjectively as well as mentally, explicitly and objectively, such that the emotions, body sensations, and images that accompany solving a problem become inextricably enmeshed in understanding the physical embodiment of an equation.

Read the rest at Psychology Today.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL