Ask HN: How do i become inventive? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do i become inventive?

4 points8sigma12 comments

If "inventiveness" can be described as a skill,how can anyone acquire it?

Build upon an existing or your very own idea but don't make it a one-off. explore at least a dozen different ways to make it better.

Artist Winslow Homer would do sketch after sketch, study after study, before he did his final "one-off" masterpiece. Keep improving the idea. It is astonishing what serendipity that can occur.

Here is a visual example: Andy Warhol's skulls:

https://www.google.com/search?q=warhol+skull+collection&tbm=...

This is a pretty good answer!

For another example, in information architecture, one way to do that is according to LATCH, which I've previously written about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554237

Another exercise is what I call "counterparts," what are all the ways other industries, other organizations, other people have solved this problem? And not just the problem as-is, but, when you simplify or abstract the problem, or you turn it into a process, or you approximate it into steps, how do those solutions go? Following a recipe in a cookbook feels very different from stepping through a software installation wizard, and yet they are both guiding us through a process.

Take the time to actually explore the entire possibility space. You can't get to the really crazy, novel solutions until you've thought through all the obvious ones. "If you didn't have to build it" and "if money and physics were no object" are valuable constraints.

Finally, spend your "inventive" energy where it matters, and don't value inventiveness for inventiveness' sake. Design has to serve masters: users, and business goals, and success metrics. If you're not testing your creative solutions against those and proving their value, then your "inventive" solution isn't any better than anyone else's "obvious" solution. An "obvious" solution that's cribbed from another industry but that tests out as a viable solution is way better than something super original that you have no idea how it's going to perform.

While some of the approaches mentioned below do work to some extent (TRIZ, etc.), they won't really make you "inventive". Personally I think they're all gimmicks (although to be fair they are gimmicks that work). I think what you really want is to "become" an inventive person instead of trying to force invent stuff. Read this book for starters: http://www.amazon.com/Where-Good-Ideas-Come-From/dp/15944853...

TRIZ was not the only Altshuller invention.

He was mostly interested in how exactly to develop a creativity trait, and came up with something called a "Theory of a Creative Personality Development", a further generalisation of TRIZ.

There are some anecdotal confirmations from various schools across the former USSR that this approach is known to produce some stable results. So at least it worth looking into.

As i mentioned it does work. And it is a good guideline to look at when you're stuck. But it's not the fundamental solution. TRIZ teaches you to emulate creativity. The whole idea is "how can an even ordinary person come up with creative ideas?" My point was that's all fine and it's good to learn that skill, but it would be better if you shoot for actually "becoming a creative person" instead of "ordinary person coming up with creative ideas". I suggested that book above because I found it helpful from that point of view.

I suspect, there is no such a thing as an inherently "creative" person. I very closely followed the biographies of many of the greatest minds, and I'm yet to see a compelling evidence that creativity is some kind of a special trait which cannot be acquired.

There are just people who somehow know the creativity tricks (either deliberately learned or randomly discovered), and the "ordinary" people who happen to have a little gap in their education. Learning the formal approaches to creativity could help to close this gap.

I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm basically agreeing with you that there is no inherently creative person and you can acquire it. I'm just making a distinction between becoming actually creative vs. emulating creativity. I would rather "become a creative person" than "use techniques to come up with creative solutions" if I were to pick one.

Firstly, as I said, all the post-TRIZ works by Altshuller were exactly about training the creativity as a personality trait, not about the formal invention methods.

Secondly, if simulating creativity is indistinguishable (by the outcome) from a "true" creativity, then the very existence of creativity is questionable, and it is likely that all forms of creativity can be explained by simply knowing (maybe subconsciously) a number of techniques of "simulating" the creativity.

I didn't say TRIZ is bad. I even said it's a good technique to learn. I just pointed out that anyone can be creative without "training". The concept of training is based on the assumption that people are not naturally creative. I think anyone has potential to come up with creative achievements in their lives but only small number of people get the opportunity or motivation to do so. I think in many cases it's just a matter of changing your mindset and putting yourself in the right environment. Anyway, if you haven't read that book I recommended above please take a look.

I'd say by broadening your interdisciplinary skills and life experiences. From first hand and what I've read others claim, these 2 things are key. Without a wide range of experience and knowledge it's still possible, but more of an innate skill. These characteristics allow you to pull different parts of knowledge and experience and combine, mix and match, and adult them to the real world.

Develop your imagination and learn how to find solutions to problems. Then figure out how to make those solutions real and workable. Break each detail down into a list of things you need to write code for in order to solve them one by one. Then build data structures and a database behind them. Build algorithms to solve them and make it into a program you can market and sell.

Not necessarily a "skill":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ

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