Creativity can be provoked on-demand
Last week I looked at SCAMPER, a procedural method for generating ideas. This week I want to share one of my favorite tools for thought, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies. It’s one of my key inspirations for Subconscious.
Oblique Strategies is a deck of cards.
You use them like this: when a dilemma occurs, draw a card.
Each card contains a single oracular provocation.
What does this card mean? Nothing (by itself). But by drawing the card, and then seeking to interpret that card within your context, you construct meaning. The card acts as a catalyst, provoking you to form new relationships between ideas that were already within you.
Consider:
You can draw a card to provoke meaning-construction at any time.
Meaning construction is an act of creation.
So, creativity can be provoked at any time.
Put another way, creativity can be procedurally generated.
What other systems might be used to provoke creativity? What if we look at Tarot through this lens?
Tarot cards have an archetypal flavor. Each card contains many symbols, provoking complex associations. Let’s look at The Fool card for a moment. What can we see?
A wanderer, carrying a bindle (what does it contain?). He’s holding a flower (Who is it for? What might it represent?). The sun is shining down on him. He looks carefree, though he’s wandering through a wild place. He doesn’t see the cliff ahead. A dog (companion?) is nipping at his heels, as if trying to warn him. There are many symbols here, and many ways they could be told as a story.
Each card also has traditional meanings: one for when you draw the card upright, and another for when you draw it upside-down.
The Fool represents new beginnings, faith in the future, being inexperienced, not knowing what to expect, beginner's luck, improvisation, believing in the universe.
Upside-down: naivety, poor judgement, folly, lack of direction, stupidity, chaos.
And this is just one card. Complex.
Meaning in tarot reading is constructed through a complex and layered associational structure of intersecting meanings and through the reader’s associations with that structure. […] By using multiple co-existing layers of meaning and symbology and not insisting that one take precedence over the other, tarot asks the reader to choose from multiple modes of interpretation to construct a coherent meaning.
Cat Manning, 2019, “Tarot as Procedural Storytelling” in “Procedural Storytelling in Game Design”
What happens when we arrange cards into a structure? Perhaps we could place 3 cards in a row, for past, present, future. A story. Or perhaps these placements are for mind, body, spirit. A different story.
Tarot, then, is a procedural algorithm: cards are drawn and placed into position according to the system the reader has chosen. The results are then read as a whole, both meanings of individual cards and the interplay of patterns coalescing to form the final impression of the reading.
Cat Manning, 2019, “Tarot as Procedural Storytelling” in “Procedural Storytelling in Game Design”
Like Oblique Strategies, it is up to you how to interpret the cards within a context to construct meaning.
The brain is a machine for jumping to conclusions.
Daniel Kahneman
Ponder any two things long enough, and your mind will find a connection between them. Our minds will find connections between things even when no connections seem to exist.
The card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves and others will become self-evident.
Oblique Strategies instruction card
No matter if a connection did not exist before. It exists now. You created it. You constructed the meaning.
Another way to see this: to use Oblique Strategies is to have a conversation between yourself and the cards.
The crucial requirement is for the self to allow the other to “speak back” and to accommodate the unexpected so that self affects other, and other affects self. Avoiding requisite variety, both get partially “out of control” in a mix of positive and negative feedback, thus conversing along non-determinable trajectories to arrive at previously unknown destinations.
Fischer, Herr (eds.), 2019, “Design Cybernetics”
Giving the cards a chance to “speak back” can help us leave behind certainty, equilibrium, stasis, and get lost in the land of ideas.
Communication (ala Shannon) and conversation are distinct. Conversation requires some communication, but very bad communication may admit very good conversation, and the existence of a perfect channel is no guarantee that any conversation will take place.
Gordon Pask
Provoking creative breakthroughs may not take much. Bad communication may admit good conversation. A simple deck of cards plus randomness may even do the trick.
This is also my intent with Geists:
Many tiny little spirits running around, provoking conversations between the self and the subconscious.