INNOVATION CHOREOGRAPHY
While buying grapes at the supermarket, one grape fell, hit the dirty floor, and rolled under the fruit counter. A falling piece of fruit is not a major event, but it somehow made me think of the apple, which supposedly fell on Newton’s head and started the era of modern science. This myth illustrates how something triggers a chain of thoughts; observations, questions, ideas and reasoning - all in a single moment of understanding and enlightenment. Can this chain of events and thoughts be practiced? To learn, how to come up with supergood, groundbreaking ideas when encountering something new?
I suddenly realised that all the laboratory experiments during science classes in school were in fact rehearsals. The basic experiments conducted in high-school physics, chemistry and biology are actually elaborately choreographed reenactments of moments of discovery. Right now, students all over the world are acting in the starring roles of the history of science, using similar props and methods as Newton, Hooke, Boyle, Lavoisier, Brown or Mendel did during their original “performances”. Since the phenomena the experiments reveal are identical to those 500 years ago, and the results are ultimately the same, the aim of the exercise is simulating enlightenment and rehearsing innovation in a fixed frame. In the design field, the logic of the exercise is often opposite. As results are expected to be original, an answer to a question become taboo once it has been proposed. Therefore, great effort is made to generate new questions, solutions, conditions, that create new aesthetic universes, in which the chain of enlightenment and innovation would give a new, different and never-before-seen results.
