I spoke with Steven Johnson today, who recently spoke at TED. He promotes the intermingling of ideas that occupy different spaces, not on any sort of spectrum, to create good ideas. These ideas also don’t have to happen at a cultural level or even a physical space like a coffeeshop, which he describes in his lecture, but it can also happen inside one-mind. He explained that it’s where he came up with the idea for one of his books. He was writing two separate books, one on neuroscience, and one on cities and couldn’t decide which one to focus. Coincidentally he was given two copies of the same book of 19th century maps from his Dad and Friend for his 30th birthday. In it, he saw a city map of Hamburg Germany which looks like a brain. It inspired him to combine the two books into one and he wrote Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software”.

It’s this intermingling and twisting together of ideas that build into great ones. In a lot of ways what he seemed to be saying was that the characteristics of someone with good ideas are someone that’s like a 概(gai)-shaped designer. Other characteristics of historical figures who came up with great ideas were people with extended social networks with diverse but weak ties to people, people who have tons of hobbies, and writes down furiously, all of their ideas, then goes back to read them. Being creative can help by colliding ideas with people different than you, subject matter where you know nothing, and your ownself from the past.

So maybe to increase the collision and the intermingling of ideas, the more confined space, the better. Kinda like if you want two pandas to mate at the zoo. Lock-em up, so that from its loins births a cute cuddly sneezy ball of awesome a result of the cross-breeding of ideas. The Confined-Space approach is more than just an multidisciplinary group working in close proximity but a full-on make-out session of different fields so bits of saliva invade each other’s thoughts. That might require years to develop that level of comfort of the free flow of ideas from one person to the other. The closest example is probably your friend-colleagues. If we want to do this in the One-Mind, it would require designers to read more on subjects like neuroscience, economic theory, behavioral science, astrobiology, or poetry, to really have any profound effect in our industry and the rest of our culture.