Novelty & Newness
The subtlest slightest kinds of differences
Having quite lost sight of the principle
Ending is better than mending
“We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better…”
A fresh focus of power
The demand for “originality”—with the implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work—is a recent one and would have seemed quite ludicrous to poets of the Augustan Age, or of Shakespeare’s time. The traditional view is that each new work should be a fresh focus of power through which former streams of beauty, emotion, and reflection are directed. This view is adopted, and perhaps carried to excess, by writers like T. S. Eliot, some of whose poems are a close web of quotations and adaptations, chosen for their associative value, or like James Joyce, who makes great use of the associative value of sounds and syllables.
Over-imagination
An architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor. However important originality may be in some fields, restraint and adherence to procedure emerge as the more significant virtues in a great many others.
We rarely wish to be surprised by novelty as we round street corners. We require consistency in our buildings, for we are ourselves frequently close to disorientation and frenzy.
The word invents itself
Posits certain neologisms as arising from their own cultural necessity—his words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you're getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself.
The Innovation Funnel
A Comic by Tom FishburneMost organizations use some version of an innovation funnel to bring ideas to life. It starts with lots of ideas at the front end and then launches whatever survives all the way to the back end.
Yet this Darwinian process of bringing ideas to life doesn’t necessarily lead to survival of the fittest ideas. If we’re not careful, the innovation funnel leads to survival of the safest ideas.
Organizations are good at spotting risks. In an effort to improve success rates, organizations tend to put sharper teeth in the funnel.
As ideas run the organizational gauntlet, they can get pruned, sheared, shaped, and watered down beyond recognition. On the way, they can lose the essence of the idea. They may lose their point of difference and reason for being.
Stepping stones in possibility space
An Article by Gordon BranderIf we try to cross this lake by following only the stepping stones that lead toward our objective, we’ll soon get stuck. But what if we let go of our objectives? What if we focused on trying to find new stepping stones instead? This is novelty search. Instead of looking for something specific, you look for something new.
Novelty search isn’t just random, it’s chance plus memory. Together, these ingredients do something interesting.
...Stepping stones are also combinatorial. Each new stepping stone we discover expands our potential to find even more stepping stones. Collecting stepping stones is a luck maximization algorithm. By collecting and combining stepping stones, we might arrive at our destination by accident, or somewhere more interesting!
Don’t Play It Like the Flute
An Article by Matthias OttDon’t play it like the flute. Play it as if it was the wind whistling through the desert dunes.
No matter what you love to create, there is something to be learned from the way Hans Zimmer approached the Dune score. We are all striving to create work that is novel, innovative, memorable, and inspiring. To get there, however, we tend to focus on getting things right, on avoiding mistakes, on “being professional”. Yes, it is important to have the commitment, dedication, and attention to detail of a professional. But being right? That will only take you so far. What is much more important is to approach the problem in front of you with curiosity and an open mind. With an urge to explore what can be found beyond the ordinary, beyond the right way of doing things. If you want to create something that nobody has come up with yet, it is important that you try out all the crazy ideas others are afraid to try, that you build prototypes, improvise, and freely play with the materials and the technologies you have at hand.
The Web is Industrialized and I Helped Industrialize It
An Article by Dave RupertIn our cultural obsession with billionaire entrepreneurs we laud new features more than the maintenance and incrementalism work of making old features better and more accessible. Maintenance looks like red minus signs in the spreadsheet. New features look like green plus signs. New features look better on our LinkedIn profiles. New features have that pizzazz, baby.
When gardening, the building of planters and initial planting is a very short process. The majority of your time is spent nurturing and monitoring growth. I personally feel the struggle between maintainer work and new shiny feature work. I enjoy that new feature smell but I know that my day-to-day is more like a janitor on a boat mopping up someone else’s barf. In terms of metaphors, the gardening metaphor is certainly better, and it acknowledges that design and development still tend to be more creative endeavors.
The Tiling Patterns of Sebastien Truchet and the Topology of Structural Hierarchy
A pattern of tiles illustrated by Douat in 1722.
A translation is given of Truchet's 1704 paper showing that an infinity of patterns can be generated by the assembly of a single half—colored tile in various orientations.
Separation and connection in all things
Truchet's approach was more topological than geometric, and the qualitative aspects of pattern take priority over the metric ones. His principles provide a kind of metaphor for the hierarchy of separation and connection in all things.
Corpuscles of nothing and atoms of something
The structure of matter devolved ultimately into the intimate coexistence of something like corpuscles of nothing and atoms of something, segregating through the accidents of history to yield regions differing in density intimately interwoven on different scales. The experience of the world as well as human perception and analysis of any part of it is a matter of the angular scale of resolution and of the time necessary for making comparison between the different parts.
Without such variations and without time to compare remembrances of them, nothing can be experiences.
The scale of resolution determines what is seen
The patterns of Truchet's tiles appear at first glance as variously shaped interlocked regions of black and white, the boundaries between the square tiles being submerged whenever the two regions flanking them have the same color, just as in a real floor the air or cement between the tile edges is not perceived—until one looks closely. The scale of resolution determines what is seen.
This is history
It is easy to see how rapidly diversity is developed by the aggregation of the simplest local choices of direction. This is history.