The very human practice of staying messy.
My WordsEye co-founder recently compiled our Alpha development plan and I made a surprising admission (even to me), “I don’t like lists.” Besides validating what my team already suspected, it made me wonder why focusing on a line item is such a challenge to my way of thinking. To look for an answer, I wandered into the post below.
I often begin my Inventive Thinking class making the bold-ish proclamation that computer science students are excellent at pulling ideas down into a concrete, useful form but not as good at juggling them in the air. And then, for the next several weeks, with structured learning in the backseat, they prove me wrong time and time again.
In grade school I deeply envied how many of my fellow students took notes: neat handwriting, organized headings, and bullet points. It spoke to the clarity of their thinking. My notes were a tangled mess of thoughts: uneven-sized words, semi-legible asides, and a desperate set of underlines, arrows, giant asterisks, and boxes — a valiant attempt to give them order and meaning. If my fellow student’s notes looked like a script of CSI, I was penning an episode of The Bear. Long before it was a thing, I found myself at the corner of “Neuro” and “Divergence.” My third grade teacher told my parents I was slow.
And so it went from first grade to my senior year of college and beyond.
But in 2019, a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum, literally.
I was commissioned to sit in on a Forum of talks — the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech — to capture what the speakers had to say and translate their words into poster-like visuals.
Over the course of some 30 odd talks, I began to notice a striking similarity between my haphazard notes and the visual translation. Things that popped out on my notes page also popped in my drawings. Things with asterisk’s in my notes got a lead role in the sketches. Ancillary details scribbled in the margins provided context-setting. Quotes-in-boxes became talk balloons. There seemed to be an implicit hierarchy of visual communication that existed even before I put pen to paper. And it all felt very matter-of-fact as if I had been doing it all my life.
Is it possible that as early as fourth grade, I was already organizing thoughts, not in neat organized clusters, but into visually salient details?
Discussions on the value of AI to innovative thinking have been heating up. AI is a very good student, essay writer, and exceptional note taker. And, as I’ve said in recent comments, Silicon Valley engineers, the most logical of note-takers and list-makers, have imbued AI with a strong answer bias. The problem is, when pursuing innovative ideas, answers aren’t the most important thing. It is questions that move our minds to the edge of things we know — to where the wild things are (as Maurice Sendak would say).
Edward De Bono’s lateral thinking does not prompt us to dig deeper into the same hole for answers, but to dig several fresh and adjacent holes. Figuring out where to dig involves a leap of imagination. And listening to our intuition, to the things that pop in our notes, is our greatest guide. Prompting AI to return I.e. “100 ideas on how AI can improve the in-store retail experience” returns everything that’s already well documented in LLMs. It still remains for humans to carry the ideas further. Even a purposely divergent query like, “Describe a Medical technology solution that leverages the features of a yoyo and a vacuum,” skews too closely to the input objects and not how their functional attributes or metaphorical associations inform a novel software solution.
So as we ask ourselves how best to design an AI platform to facilitate innovative thinking, let’s not just design to the test. Let’s build something that triggers new thinking rather than hiding what’s new behind what’s known. Let’s celebrate the gaps we can fill rather than finished sentences; adjacencies rather than ordered lists. Let’s have AI ask questions like a 5-year old rather than a seasoned expert.
There is a friction that exists between structured and distinctly human unstructured thinking. And embracing our messiness is an important way for us to stay in the mix.
