Revisioning

“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Central to creativity is the ability to see things in a new way, to be able to visualize the common uncommonly.  Whether you are lucky enough to have this as a talent or need to practice it as a habit, it is certainly a key element in innovation.

A new pattern, a new geometry in the mind, a different way of diagramming what there is.  Revisioning, in other words, which means reshaping the way we visualize things.  Take ringing, for instance.  Not the sound but the maneuver…taking a set of linear points and bending them into a circle or ring.  It is suprising how many creative breatkthroughs have depended on this simple revisioning.

In 1865 a Belgian professor of chemistry by the name of Frederich August von Kekule was struggling with the problem of how to visualize the benzene molecule.  No matter how he played with its arrangement of carbon and hydrogen atoms in his mind, he could never seem to fit them together in a coherent way.

In his diary Kekule wrote about dozing by a fire and seeing the atoms in his mind’s eye in long rows twining and twisting in a snakelike motion.  When one of the snakes seized hold of its own tail and formed a ring, he realized that the structure of benzene might be circular.  “Let us learn to dream, gentlemen,” he wrote.

Since snakes do not really form themselves into rings, Kekule was more likely imagining a well-known graphic image called an oroborous, an alchemical symbol of a snake biting its own tail.  But however it came into his consciousness, this trick of the mind allowed him to revision the way he saw the molecule…not as a linear arrangement but as a circular one.  It was a simple thing to do yet no one else studying the problem in 50 years thought to do it.  That insight became the basis for the entire field of organic chemistry, which uses a ring structure for all organic molecules.

Isaac Newton had a similar breakthrough in 1664, the year in which he came up with the theory of gravity, explored the new science of light and optics, and invented the calculus.  Using a prism, Newton was observing the neat, orderly sequence of the colors of the spectrum when it occurred to him that, since the colors at the ends of the spectrum looked similar, it might be fruitful to arrange them into a circle.  At that moment, he invented the color wheel.

This revisioning allowed him to see the structure of color in a new way and led to the notions of color families, differences between hue and chroma and intensity, relationships around and across, supplementary and complementary colors, neutral grays in the middle.

All modern theories of color and practical guides for color mixing are based on it.

Early clocks were linear shadow markers indicating the passage of time using the height of the sun.  It took until the 11^th century to hit on the idea of putting that linear sequence into a circle to get the clockface…and a new way to think about time.  The circle of fifths in music, the thermodynamic circle in physics that clarifies molecular motion, even the circling of the wagons for self-protection….all rely on this move in the mind, turning a linear structure into a ringing one.

The ring is not the only way to revision...the hub is another one that has led to breatkthroughs in business structure, economics, and city planning.  The twirl has been at the center of the invention of rope and the structure of DNA.  This ability to revision, to look at a familiar structure and reform it in our minds, to use shapes as a tool for creative thinking…this is the ability we need to include in the Ingenarium.  Although, given its role in the history of innovation, it would not hurt to toss a ring in.