When we developed a secret product we were stuck and had no idea how to solve the problem.
What we figured out was that any patent we had found was very predictable and followed the DID-Pattern. All patents we found were based on inspirations from other design solutions. Having LALIAFLIA at hand, we were clear about the approach we had to undertake. We had to apply the LID (Life Inspires Design) Pattern and start to ask the question: which creature (human, animal or plant) can give us the boost we need to get to an ORIGINAL result? For one version we used a part of our body as a source of inspiration and a dolphin for the other.
LALIAFLIA was not just a conceptual guideline to understand innovation in general, but also a way of solving a problem in an innovative way.
In the patenting process I talked to a physician from the University of Bremen who referred to TRIZ. Dr. Walter and his collegues use this method, which was developed by a Russian engineer called Genrich Saulowitsch Altschuller. The idea behind TRIZ is that there are over 40 Principles underlying any innovation. If you take the 40 princiles from TRIZ and compare them with LALIAFLIA and the properties living things can have, than you can be certain, that all of them fit into any living phenomenon and can be extended with thousands further more principles that Mr. Altschuller couldn't think about.
But TRIZ is not the only place someone was looking for originality. Recently there was a video published by the RSA about where good ideas come from by Steven Johnson. The first thing that fascinated me was the fact that we see a lot of drawings of living things like turtles and so on. Steven Johnson has focused in his research on the "spaces" where good ideas come from. He argues that most world changing innovations didn't come in a "sudden stroke of inspiration", the ideas needed long time to incubate. Other ideas, Steven argues, needed a place (hunch) where they can meet other minds and make up a new better idea. The same process can be found in meiosis, where two genetic informations come together and make up a new one. Even though this process might appear to most people as a breakthrough in developing innovative ideas, from the perspective of LALIAFLIA, what Steven calls "The chance favours the connected mind" is not enough. The connection needs to happen between people with each other and other creatures and living phenomenons. Instead of waiting for years to get the right source of inspiration from people, we can use LALIAFLIA as a creative method and shorten the creative process from 5 years to 5 seconds by using LIFE as a source of inspiration.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook (Todays most successful digital LIA) talked to his co-founder about: "...taking the entire social experience of college and put it online."
The abstraction of the college social experience is now connecting us with our friends and family members. "Add me as a friend" has become a way of staying in touch with people.
Surprisingly, great ideas don't come from brainstormings and thoughts of other people or by observing new trends in technology and design. Great ideas come from thinking in the LALIAFLIA pattern.
By using LALIAFLIA, we can invent a new product and service every single day.
If you don't innovate using LALIAFLIA you most probably use the DID-Pattern or the NID-Pattern. These options lead to predictable and copy and paste results. Most leading creative minds talk about "It's not about evolution, it's about revolution." The revolution is the star, which is the `original´ approach and the evolution is the tree, which is the `add on top´ approach (a.k.a. Benchmarking)
Don't get me wrong, LALIAFLIA is not aiming to set a totalitarian rule that innovators have to follow (I have to mention this to avoid comments from PhD students like: "Are you trying to say that everything is wrong?" or "...you know that creatives think there is nothing above them, even not god...").
LALIAFLIA is more a free associational method that leaves room for more greater unknown ideas than most people could think about.
The method is there to rescue LIFE from being taken as hostage by Science (look at ZOO's) and to facilitate the vivid ideas to creatives.
The Trinity of Innovation consists of only three ways to create things. Any design can be seen in the forefront of these three patterns. Recognizing the pattern is key to escape into smarter ideas:
LID (Life inspires Design) like Birds-Wing
The whole idea of LALIAFLIA is "how to create innovations by taking any living thing as inspiration or even how to transform every human made thing into an abstraction of LIFE". In the beginning of LALIAFLIA I was talking about "I gave up human thought as the answer to all problems in life. In my eyes the greatest men in the world had lost the battle against the suppressed mother of life – Life itself."
If you look at the innovative air-moving systems developed by the company FESTO, you can witness this scenario.
In evolution studies this process is described as: "Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind."
LALIAFLIA is a guarantee for originality. A business designer said instantly to me: "I never thought about the real meaning of originality."
Any innovator who is engaged in this process will lead the innovation scenery! That's why Kevin Kelly talks about: “Organic life is the ultimate technology, and all technology will improve towards biology (he means life).”
The difference between life and design is deminishing, LALIAFLIA accelerates this process by provinding a method that helps innovators to abstract life (even humans) in design.
DID (Design inspires Design) like NOTE BOOK
Most people would think that Renaissance (re-birth) is LALIAFLIA in a way, but not really. The age of the Renaissance is the re-birth of dead ideas. Maslows pyramid of need is a dead metaphor illustrating the need of humans in the frame of a triangle. Cranes try to be big arms carrying heavy loads and reaching difficult places, but they never made it out of the DID-pattern. The examples are infinite.
Gilles Deleuze said rightly "And when it thinks it is producing something else, it is in fact only reproducing itself."
About 99% of the innovation found in our society today follow the DID-Pattern. One of the most conservative of all is the design of letters and spoken-sound. Many creatives are blinded by tradition and semiotics to recognize this phenomenon.
Any innovator who is able to transform a DID-Pattern into an LID-Pattern has been worshiped as genius like Darwin, Gaudi, Steve Jobs, Da Vinci ect.
NID (Nature inspires Design) like "Be water my friend"
Not only Bruce Lee used this way of innovation, but also the inventors of the first clock were using nature (physics) to invent our time. As we all know, a day comes from the rotation of the earth around itself, a month from the rotation of the moon around the earth and a year from the rotation of the earth around the sun. Since I have no clue how to read a TRADITIONAL watch within 2 seconds, I thought about a real NID-Watch that shows the dark and bright part of the world in relation to someones's current position.
NID is not LALIAFLIA and LALIAFLIA is surely NOT about nature. But there are a few products and services that take physics as a source of inspiration and even they will be replaced by LID-Patterns.
0 comments:
Post a Comment