Doodledo

“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.”

Linus Pauling

A philosophy professor of mine had an interesting and annoying assignment: List ten things you know about an apple.  Now list ten more things.  Now list twenty more things…and so on.

He was trying to get us to practice thinkering, imagining, conceiving.  It was tedious at first but instructive later on.  After you exhaust the obvious – you can eat it, it is red, it grows on trees, etc. – you turn to the unexpected.  It falls at the rate of 32 feet per second per second, cut it crosswise and it reveals a star, each one is ¼ water which is why they float, and so on.  Then comes the opaque from Adam to William Tell to Isaac Newton to Steve Jobs.  And then the deep…it is what is, when it is, and nothing less.  It is the very measure of love by a bushel and a peck.  And finally something like this: an apple hides its yearning like the sun, now coy, now brazen.

From a simple description to a line of poetry in only forty or so steps.  A silly exercise maybe but that kind of working at an idea and pushing out notions is pure practice in creative thinking and crucial to breakthroughs of all kinds.

We have already put play and thinkering into the Ingenarium, but let us now add a small idea generating engine by way of any habit or practice that will allow us to produce concepts.  A lot of them, more than we need, way more than we can ever use.  We can do it through daydreaming, nightdreaming, brainstorming, drinking (water, that is, to hydrate), sputtering, babbling…it doesn’t matter.  The idea is to get lots of ideas to work with, or ignore, or improve.

Painters use sketches to accomplish this; designers draw thumbnails for the same reason.   These kinds of practices help us to exercise our playfulness with the material but also help to produce concepts.  Novelists write snippets or snatches or even background stories that may not ever appear in the final book for the same reason.  Entrepreneurs draw bubble charts of business strategies.  The purpose is not to define the final product but to produce ideas for it, loads of them.  Parents who keep art supplies, artists who collect junk, or inventors with bins of things, all know how this works.  The more ideas you produce, the more productive your idea generation becomes.  The road to creativity is littered with unused ideas but that is a good thing because they make the road itself possible. 

Doodledo is an amusing word that means to fool around and generate ideas and make silly pictures and then see what sticks and works.  Doodledo is really a way of working through the whole mind-into-matter transformation.  When you draw a bunch of sketches or thumbnails or make mock-ups, you are in effect testing the material waters.  Trying out ideas on the world bit by bit, even in a very rudimentary form.  And these useless ideas lead to new ones and that is the whole point.  The writer Emile Chartier wrote: “Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.”

Most serious people think of this kind of toying around and throwing out thoughts as unserious.  But that is only the view from a culture that focuses on moments of triumph, not all the work that went into them.  Frank Lloyd Wright testing his ideas on form and structure by playing with toy blocks and Linus Pauling folding and twisting paper models of his double helix concept for DNA in order to better visualize the possibilities are both examples of the usefulness of sheer idea generation.

A familiar joke says that there is no great trick to being smart, you just have just come up with something idiotic and not do it.  But that kind of restraint is better for humor than for creative effort.  For our creative practice, we need the opposite…a habit and method for coming up with lots of ideas, even idiotic ones, and then sifting through them and sticking with the stuff that works best.  And so we toss some doodledo into our Ingenarium.