The Groove Issue 91 - How to Use Metaphors to Create Something New
HOW TO USE METAPHORS TO CREATE SOMETHING NEW
Great ideas germinate when you combine different concepts. In many cases, they spring out of how you reorganize existing knowledge through analogies, by connecting the dots from something outside your realm to yours.
Analogical reasoning and the use of metaphors in creativity involves identifying the similarities between events, objects, or knowledge so that you can come up with something new. In other words, you can identify information from previous situations in completely different fields and transfer them to your province.
How Thinking About The Cosmos Created an Art Movement
Lucio Fontana in his studio in Milan in the late 1950s.
Looking for new ways to think about art, Argentinian-Italian artist Lucio Fontana officially introduced the Spatialist movement in 1947. He stated in the movement’s manifesto that, “Matter, color, and sound in motion are the phenomena whose simultaneous development makes up the new art.”
Fontana had gotten his ideas using metaphors and analogies borrowed from the impact that the first photographs of Earth taken from a rocket had caused on him.
Thinking constantly about these photos, in 1949 he had a great epiphany: his Concetto Spaziale (spatial concept) where he began puncturing the canvas with holes, revealing a dark ground within.
No artists would have ever thought of piercing their own canvases to come up with something new, yet Fontana wasn’t like most artists. He was deeply immersed in studying other fields that included outer space, the theory of relativity, physics, and phenomena outside of easels, canvases and brushes.
Using Metaphors
Two of the many Concetto Spaziale paintings that Fontana pioneered.
“My holes are the indication of Nothingness, of Void,” Fontana wrote, likening them to the unfathomable universe. “Einstein’s discovery of the cosmos is of the dimension of the infinite, without end . . . [When] I puncture, Infinity passes there, light passes, there’s no need to paint. Everyone thought I wanted to destroy, but it’s not true, I’ve created.”
As Fontana paraphrased Einstein and brought the latter’s ideas to his art, his brilliant move aimed to unite real space with imagined space. It guaranteed his spot in art history and financial success until the end of his life.
At the studio in Milan in the 1960s.
Sometimes he didn’t even have to change the name of the outside events whose metaphors he translated into his art: “I say dimension because I cannot think what other word to use. I make a hole in the canvas in order to leave behind me the old pictorial formulae, the painting and the traditional view of art – and I escape symbolically, but also materially, from the prison of the flat surface.”
The Concetto Spaziale paintings literally slayed, as Fontana produced thousands of them in dozens of colors and sizes that besides residing in every major museum around the world, have generated millions of dollars in value as collectors continue to bid fiercely for them at auction.
The Analogy that Created a Billion Dollar Business
But how do these analogies translate to business? Pretty much in the same way. If you are intrigued by any phenomena that piques your curiosity, chances are that you will at some point find something worth bringing to your own space.
Swiss engineer George de Mestral was walking in the Alps with his dog in 1941, and upon his return home he noticed the strength with which burdock burrs stuck to his clothes and to his dog’s fur. Moved by curiosity, he examined the burrs under a microscope and saw hundreds of hooks that caught on to anything with a loop, like fabrics or hair.
He saw this as a model to translate into an invention: he’d replicate the mechanism with a nylon fastener that could hold things together by mimicking hooks and loops.
After much trial and error, he patented his invention and called it Velcro, a portmanteau of the French words velour and crochet. He eventually created a company with the same name that would go on to sell billions of dollars in products by providing an alternative to zippers, buttons and laces.
Fontana and Mestre were searching for analogies that prompted them to find features that could work in other domains, forming a correspondence of functions between them.
As professor Robert Root-Bernstein said: “sometimes it is the inexact, imperfect nature of the analogy that allows it to bridge the gap between the known and the unknown.”
HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD
I am super thrilled to announce that my book won the International Book Award in the Business/Entrepreneurship category!
Have you already gotten your copy?
It’s in three formats: hardcover, eBook and audiobook. Get it here.
EVENT INVITE
Also, I’m super stoked to invite you to an online event hosted by Stanford d.School where I’ll be discussing my book with Jeremy Utley this Thursday June 16th at 1:00 pm EDT/ 10:00 PDT.
Registration is free here.
Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?
I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.