Patterns of Imagination

As a child he loved to make things. Unencumbered with the requirement that things work well under real world conditions, success was more about imagination than rigor. If it seemed plausible there was reason to rejoice and move on to yet bigger ideas.

One could make a case for the hard work it takes to test, implement, replicate, make sustainable etc. each idea. But it seemed not quite right that ideas should be subordinated to implementation's management. The bias, if that is what it was, was likely in response to the creative stifling effect of betting on incremental improvement to the exclusion of quantum jumps in making life better.

Confronted now with the fine line between productive brain-storming and escapist day-dreaming he came to an important agenda item for today's meeting: what pattern do we apply for measuring productive flights of fancy? The research data tended to show that this pattern could be empirically derived if, and only if, biases of a certain type could be effectively mitigated. These biases often were at small angles to primary dimensions in the creative opportunity space making them easy to study.

With the latest candidate list of the dimensions before him he once again noted the special temporal dimension which often had a unique relationship to the others. In this case, reversal and rate variation were more key considerations than was the norm for patterns of this class.

"Leap of Faith" was a useful concept when deciding on a new direction. To the degree that such an action was based on automatic execution of sequencing patterns, one could expect a large connected data base and the ability to navigate it quickly would yield very large benefits indeed.

He felt the mild panic that highly accomplished artists describe just before a performance. There was an element of leaping when choosing to interact with ...