Tension - The Essence of Creative Problem Solving

I have always thought that art and problem solving have something in common.  It has often been said that creating art is ‘in the seeing’ - reflecting what the artist sees.  So it is with problem solving, seeing the  problem in a new way leads to an insight that brings about the solution.  ‘Seeing’ is much about leaving out  details as including them, and seeing from novel perspectives provides insights both in art and problems.



For example, look at this picture (email readers view image here).  We easily recognise it as a man’s face, but the colours are completely wrong.  No face was ever coloured like that, it is an impossible image, yet somehow it works.

Furthermore, we are drawn to the image.  This is because of the ‘tension’ between what we know to be the normal facial colours and those in the picture.  Our brain tries to ‘resolve’ the tension between what we are expecting and what we see, by imagining the possible lighting that would create the startling colour effects.  Personally, I see a wet face perhaps in a brightly lit street full of neon lighting.  It works.

Edgar Degas put it well, "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."

The artist has set us a problem of how to make sense of something that is ‘wrong’.  He has set up a tension in the picture that we have to overcome. We don’t just say, “well that’s impossible”, we ‘solve’ it by creating the circumstances in which it could be true. When we work it out, we gain a new perspective about the image. There is no logic involved here, intuitively we figure out how to make sense of the image.

Some problems don’t have logical solutions, and intuition can provide some help.  By setting up a tension - an internal conflict, we can get a new perspective on the problem and gain an insight.

This is the essence of creative problem solving.

For this and similar images, go to
http://scene360.com/main_news/7100/vibrant-knife-painting/

One Way to solve an African problem

I have been reading “The Shadow of the Sun” by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Its about his life as the Africa correspondent for a Polish newspaper and is a collection of anecdotes of his life there.

In one episode, he was living in Lagos, Nigeria.  His apartment was in one of the less upmarket areas and consequently was regularly broken into. Putting secure locks on the doors would prove to be ineffective as it would merely attract more attention.

One day he met and got to know Suleiman, a man from northern Nigeria, who knew his landlord. He mentioned his problem to Suleiman and some time later Suleiman took him to a market that sold witch doctors medicines, talismans, etc. Suleiman told him to buy a certain bunch of expensive white rooster feathers. When they returned to his apartment, Suleiman arranged the feathers and tied them to the top of the doorframe.

He was never burgled again.

Now we all know the chicken feathers are unlikely to deter any potential thief.  How could that possibly work? To western eyes, it was no solution at at all, but the point is, it worked in the culture of Lagos.

Perhaps sometimes we should view the solutions to problems from different perspectives.