Time and Space for good ideas
The tale of how The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe came to be is an illustration of what contemporary science author and popular media theorist Steven Johnson calls hunch cultivation. Good ideas take time to incubate. The slow hunch is the collision of smaller hunches gestating over ten, twenty or thirty years. For example, C. S. Lewis envisioned “a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood” for twenty-five years before commencing his novel.
In his book Where good ideas come from: the Natural History of Innovation, Johnson dismisses the notion of a single light bulb moment of creativity. He suggests we need to change our models of thinking about the spaces that enable innovation. The engine room of creativity, as Johnson calls it, is dependent upon a network pattern of connectivity, which allows the borrowing from other people’s hunches and combining them to make something new. Historically, the great coffee houses of Europe served this purpose. A place for social networks, shared interests, discussion of ideas, a place of identity. Whilst working on Narnia, Lewis was in a writing group called The Inklings, with The Lord of the Rings author JR Tolkien, the men meeting weekly to discuss their work. In the modern age, connectivity is delivered by the web.
Johnson’s slow hunch theory presents educators with mental model challenges for our current ways of working. If we are to foster hunch cultivation, we need a system to allow hunches to come together, mingle and swap so that a breakthrough can develop. Boundless time, the sharing of ideas and collaboration to generate something new can be explored in environments beyond the classroom. QACreativity explores the participatory culture of digital collectives as an engine room of creativity for CAS.
The tale of how The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe came to be is an illustration of what contemporary science author and popular media theorist Steven Johnson calls hunch cultivation. Good ideas take time to incubate. The slow hunch is the collision of smaller hunches gestating over ten, twenty or thirty years. For example, C. S. Lewis envisioned “a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood” for twenty-five years before commencing his novel.
In his book Where good ideas come from: the Natural History of Innovation, Johnson dismisses the notion of a single light bulb moment of creativity. He suggests we need to change our models of thinking about the spaces that enable innovation. The engine room of creativity, as Johnson calls it, is dependent upon a network pattern of connectivity, which allows the borrowing from other people’s hunches and combining them to make something new. Historically, the great coffee houses of Europe served this purpose. A place for social networks, shared interests, discussion of ideas, a place of identity. Whilst working on Narnia, Lewis was in a writing group called The Inklings, with The Lord of the Rings author JR Tolkien, the men meeting weekly to discuss their work. In the modern age, connectivity is delivered by the web.
Johnson’s slow hunch theory presents educators with mental model challenges for our current ways of working. If we are to foster hunch cultivation, we need a system to allow hunches to come together, mingle and swap so that a breakthrough can develop. Boundless time, the sharing of ideas and collaboration to generate something new can be explored in environments beyond the classroom. QACreativity explores the participatory culture of digital collectives as an engine room of creativity for CAS.
A system for incubation of ideas.