Ideation Method: Embrace Opposites

I'd like to tell you now about a technique that  I use often – a very simple technique to enhance structures. I've already got some sort of dimensional, categorical way of describing a problem and to make it richer or to explore whether you can make it richer. We often have things which *appear* to be opposites.

So, in political life you might have left wing versus right wing. In personalities, you might have an introvert versus extrovert. And whenever I'm faced with a dichotomy that says 'this or this', I ask myself, 'Can it be both?' So, we might have – in a classic user interface kit, we've been using menus as examples – you might have menus versus radio  buttons.

And they're completely different things – something is either a menu or it's a radio button. Neither both. But what about, could you have something that's *both* a menu and a radio button? So, could you have something that looks like a menu, perhaps pulls down but has radio buttons inside it? Would that work? Or neither, of course, but neither is (inaud.) – you can think of things like text. But can it be both? So, rather than saying A or B – one or the other – can you actually have something that has elements of both going on?

And sometimes the answer is no and your categories are disjoint. But often if you ask about something being both, you learn something or at the very least you learn that these really are distinct. You can do the same for  things that are – so that's true of things which are like menu versus radio button, which are categories, but also things like the left (inaudible) right button ring, which is more of a dimension. Sometimes you (inaud.) to ask if a thing is a bit of each. Can you have something that's *almost*

menu-like but also has a little bit of radio button? I'm not quite sure what that would be, but that  might be true of, say, the fiction versus versus non-fiction. So, you might say, 'These are my fiction books. These are my non-fiction books.' You know – what would it mean for something to be mostly fiction with a little bit of non-fiction? So, again, a historical novel  might fit into that category. And what you're doing then, actually,  is you're taking what appears to be  

*categorical distinction* – it's either this or this –  and actually turning it into a *dimension*. It could be totally the one thing; it could be totally  other – totally fiction, totally non-fiction, but possibly somewhere in between. So, you can both look at more rich categories, things that are both, but also *turn* what appears to be a categorical distinction into a dimensional one. And dimensions tend to be richer, partial things. They can be more problematic, but they're often richer. However, if you've got dimensions, you can do similar tricks to dimensions.

So, let's think of the classic personality trait – introvert, extrovert. And whenever I see a scale that's got something on one end, something on the other, I always want to twist it and say, 'Well, what about if it was bent in half? Can we imagine somebody who is both very introvert *and* very extrovert? Or can we imagine somebody who's very non-extrovert *and* very non-introvert? Do we have to see these as opposites? Can we actually think about combinations?

Maybe it's at different times; maybe it's at the same time. What would that mean? And we start to learn about the nature of  personality, perhaps a richer way than if you see things always in terms of polarities. So, again, it's a powerful way. Again, sometimes the answer is you do something like this and you think, 'Actually, this is meaningless. There really, really is a distinction.' But so many times, I've found that what appears to be

the sort of middle neutral point in fact can consist of both – shall we say – a more neutral something that has neither characteristics, but also something that embodies both characteristics can be placed in that middle, and they're actually more that they sit out at the top right-hand corner. In one way, so what these opposites  do is they again help you, as with many of the other techniques we've looked at, to feed your gut feelings.

So, some of the things we start off – when we start off with concrete examples, we've been taking something that's very solid. You know – I know this is a mug; I know this is a remote control, and dealing with those concrete things, and then using that to abstract, to start to have a vocabulary to talk about our problem domain. What we're doing here is taking that  vocabulary and creating more of these gut feelings that enable us to actually look at it  and think, 'Yes, I can imagine something there.'