Butting

“Creativity is just connecting things.”
Steve Jobs

Maybe the most basic and obvious of creative gambits is the practice of putting two things together that don’t go.

In his book The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler referred to this as bisociation.  Two wrong things slammed together can create inanity of course, but they can also charm.  What does a kite-flying frog do for you?  Nothing much probably…unless you are a children’s book author.  Over and over again in science and art, bisociation has been at the core of breakthroughs.

As an example, take Johannes Gutenberg who is always credited with the invention of the printing press.  A major breakthrough but it is much more revealing to see his innovation as an example of this kind of butting together of disparate ideas.  One plus one makes new.  The press that Gutenberg invented was really based on the butting of three existing items.

First was relief printing, a method already used for playing cards in which ink on a raised surface could be transferred to paper repeatedly.  That was a well-known technology in Gutenberg’s time.  Second was the idea of casting the letters of the alphabet in metal so they could be reused and moved.  That too was already in place from the existing manufacture of coins and seals.  Butt those two together and you have moveable type, which had already been in practice in China.  Gutenberg was not so much butting as rebutting, except that, according to his letters, he was not at all familiar with that fact. 

But it was the third piece of the puzzle, the next butting insight, that led to the print revolution.  This relied on another technology, an existing mechanism used in the wine harvest.  Printing in Gutenberg’s time involved paper hand pressed against metal or wooden plates.  But as he wrote at the time: ”I took part in the wine harvest.  I watched the wine flowing, and going back from the effect to the cause, I studied the power of his press which nothing can resist.”  He was referring to a screw press that applied enormous pressure as it squeezed the grapes.

So putting together raised molds for letters and the screw press is what finally led to the mass production of books by the mid 1400s.

Butting, or bisociation, is one of the purest sources for innovation.  It is not usually arbitrary but more often comes to a prepared mind already thinking about a problem and looking for solutions. 

Another example involves the invention of George de Mestral who, taking a hike in his native Switzerland, came home covered with cockleburs.  He was an inventor and naturally interested in the structure of things, so instead of just being annoyed, he put the burs under his microscope.  (Curiosity is already in the Ingenarium).  On closer examination, he saw the little hooks on the ends of the cocklebur that make them stick to fabric and fur and that allow them to be distributed by animals for propagation.  Butting that fact together with the idea of a method for securing fabric, he came up with Velcro.  

Even accidents can be useful when the right things butt.

When Marshall McLuhan came up with a name for an article he was writing, he wrote down the temporary title “The Medium in the Mass Age.”  But when he left out the space between the last two words, the unexpected word “Massage” suddenly popped up.  (Misteaking is also already in the Ingenarium).  The two words don’t fit but the idea of the medium as a kind of massage, soothing us into submission, led to an entirely new line of thought for McLuhan that became a catch phrase for his approach. 

So the next ingredient we need is this habit of taking two or more unrelated things and slamming them together to make something new and useful.  Or at least a willingness to see the connections between odd bedfellows.  It doesn’t always lead to innovation, but when it does, we change the world.  We can call this creative maneuver butting and place it into our Ingenarium and see what happens.