ACM Interactions

If I had to recommend a book about creative thinking, it would be Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein’s Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People [1]. I read the book on my flight to London, and I was particularly interested in the section on abstraction, which discusses how great artists like Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore used it in their work. Shortly after I arrived in London, I had the opportunity to see one of Moore’s sculptures at the RCA faculty lounge, where I took a photo with his wax figure. From the introduction to the picture poem in the same part of the book, I was able to sense how beauty emerged from the synergy between text and graphic, and from the artwork’s abstraction.

Among the 13 thinking tools, analogy, abstraction, pattern formation, and transformation are the ones that many designers use every day. Through numerous examples, the authors show the similarities between creative thought processes in science, art, the humanities, music, literature, and engineering. The authors creatively and artfully organize creative thinking methods with a systematic investigation of great minds from a wide range of fields.

The Root-Bernsteins argue that a master of thinking, like a cook, mixes and combines various mental materials. One has to practice various recipes with cooking utensils in a creativity kitchen. I like this analogy because I too think of designers as chefs on an interdisciplinary team (as described in a previous post). I was intrigued that many of the tools, if customized, could be cooking utensils and recipes for designers, which makes the mental cooking of the designer unique and outstanding. 

The title of the Korean version of Sparks of Genius is The Birth of Thinking. This implies that the tools can be used for creating thoughts. However, I think of the tools as more useful for evaluating new thoughts. I often use these tools to critique student designs. For practical use in design education and practice, I wish the thinking tools could be customized to both generate and evaluate creative thoughts. I am not sure if such a customization is possible, since creative thoughts are often generated spontaneously. Even if such customized tools existed, it might be difficult to find effective methods for using the tools in design education and practice.

One tool I found suitable for such a purpose is recursion. Recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way. The process of self reference creates a new solution by automation. Two parallel mirrors facing each other are symbolic objects of recursion. The images in the mirrors are repeated infinitely. The process, the result, and the experience often provide feelings of mystery, elegance, beauty, and fun. Recursion is well known in fields such as linguistics, mathematics, and computer science. I first experienced the artistic elegance of recursion when learning computer programming. It was difficult for me to understand at first. The flow was easily twisted and tangled. However, when the repeating cycle of recursion is made, beautiful solutions are generated from just a few lines of code. I often get similar feelings of beauty and elegance from mathematical fractals and from Escher’s artwork.

Graphics and logic are not the only fields that use recursion. It can be applied in creative storytelling as well. Films that involve time travel are representative examples of recursive storytelling. In The Terminator, the protagonist, John Connor, sends Kyle Reese back in time to have him protect Connor’s mother. The fact that Kyle becomes his father is the highlight and the story’s dramatic reversion. Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, which I mentioned in an earlier post, also employs a recursive narrative. The screenwriter who adapts the story is also the protagonist. The film is about its own genesis and shows the process of Charlie Kaufman writing the screenplay of the movie.

Reflexivity is strongly related to recursion and is more popularly used in the social sciences. Reflexivity refers to the circular relationships between cause and effect. Reflexivity focuses more on the relationship while recursion focuses on the process. The difference is that reflexivity starts with two entities, such as the chicken and the egg. Recursion can start from itself. But I think the two notions are similar. In film, a film about making a film is called reflexive. It makes the audience aware of the filmmaking process. It can also be called a recursive film. I think the creative power of recursion and reflexivity is rooted in the resonance and internal symmetry produced by iterative self-reference.

A few years ago at SIGGRAPH’s art and design gallery, Misung Lee and I exhibited an interactive media installation titled Through the Time Tunnel [2]. It was inspired by the concept of recursion. We borrowed the concept of the recursive images created when two mirrors face each other. In that setting, the repeated images were seen in the mirrors at the same time. Strictly speaking, the reflected images were scenes from the past. Hence, the mirrors were a medium for meeting one’s past self. We exaggerated this situation by having a person face a past scene through a mirror that was digitally simulated by a camera and a projector. We created a tunnel effect with the images within images that resulted from the digital cameras. We added more time delay in the reflected and nested images so that they showed scenes from the past. We added simple tunnel navigation buttons that allowed visitors to control and experience time travel in space.

Recursion is used in the design of everyday goods. It offers simple but versatile ways to create new products. In our faculty lounge, we have a waste bin that resembles wastepaper. In our faculty restaurant, there is an umbrella container that has the shape of an umbrella. Other products of this kind include a pencil case in the shape of a pencil and a humidifier in shape of a water drop. The RepRap, an open-source 3-D printer that can print itself, is another product that uses recursive design.

Recursive design can go beyond appearance and style. I recently advised Kyunghyun Kim’s master’s thesis project, which used recursion in the design of a lamp [3]. The design proposal was to create a unique product through self reference and adaptation. The product matures by referencing the functions or fundamental attributes of itself. With a lamp, the fundamental attributes of the product might be light and brightness. We imagined a situation in which the changing brightness of natural light determines the final shape of a lamp. In this scenario, a user purchases an incomplete lamp and places it in a desired spot. Over a certain period of time, the lamp captures the changes in brightness in that spot. The captured data is translated into a 3-D shape of the lamp shade. The 3-D modeling data is sent to an associated 3-D printing system, and the last component of the lamp—the lamp shade—is created and delivered to the user. The completed lamp is a one-of-a-kind product.

I am not sure if recursion can be used as a thinking utensil for a designer’s mental cooking. It might have to be revised to be more pragmatic. Nevertheless, I wish to have a great creativity kitchen for designers, for which I will collect more thinking utensils and recipes. 

Endnotes

1. Root-Bernstein, R. and Root-Bernstein M. (2001) Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People, Mariner Books

2. Lee, M. and Nam, T. (2008) Through the Time Tunnel, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '08, p98-99. (SIGGRAPH 2008 art gallery)

3. Kim, K., (2013) Designing Unique Product with Self-Morphing Randomness, Unpublished master’s thesis, Department of Industrial Design, KAIST (in Korean)

Tek-Jin Nam