It's Bigger on the Inside: Thinking Inside an Infinite Box

Lately I’ve been squirreling all over the place, which is equal parts exciting and frustrating. The part where I’m overwhelmed by the ideas flooding my brain is the exciting bit - the part where I have to pick which one I actually want to pursue and develop is where the frustration comes in.

At the same time, projects at my job are intense and a bit all consuming, so...there’s that too.

Meanwhile, it all started with a small tray and an idea for an experiment. I was stuck on a problem I’d been mulling over on another project and felt the need to kick some creative thinking into high gear. It occurred to me that changing my perspective on everything might do the trick. And I had a random thought about limiting rather than expanding my view.

Creativity through constraint.

Have you ever Google image searched The White Stripes? If you do, something interesting is immediately apparent. They limit themselves to the colors red, black, and white whenever representing the band.

This, and some other self-imposed rules, are a forced constraint. Yet, within this limitation they have unlimited ideas for how to use the color scheme creatively.

That got me to wondering, would setting some constraints, not having to think about what palette they would use for an album or concert actually free them to explore deeper along alternate creative axes?

Perhaps having a virtually unbounded problem actually inhibits creativity, maybe an overwhelming number of options causes a block created by too many options? Does too much freedom generate an overload that subverts a deeper exploration and stifles real creativity?

This line of thought got me curious about performing a thought experiment, what if I imposed some artificial constraint around my inventions in general?

So, what types of things could I constrain?

Energy?

No, that assumes all my ideas need a power source, and building something clockwork or driven by wind, rain, or sun might be fun.

Color?

No, I couldn’t possibly copy The White Stripes, and color is often immaterial to the invention/creation/idea generation stage of what I do.

Complexity?

How do you assess, measure, or set an objective measure of complexity?

Physical size?

And then I remembered these cool little toys from my childhood: Pocketeers.

I loved them and wanted to have all the Pocketeers.

I'd pop into one of the two toy shops in Atherstone, Cooke and Ryder’s, and covet that display, like Raphie and his Red Ryder BB-gun but with less potential to lose an eye. (Yes, they were one of the few safe things I coveted as a child.)

Each was the same physical size, a little longer than a deck of cards, but not as thick. The way they stacked in the display made me feel like one of the cool older kids flipping through vinyl records, but each one of these was a toy, a complete mini-game in a standard, pocket-size format.

They were expensive though (relative to the time and my general lack of pocket change). I don’t remember how much, but I only had two or three. So, I would stack the empty boxes they came in with the games themselves alternating between, to appear as if I had six.

Upon remembering these toys, I realized physical size was the constraint I wanted to impose on my creations. To think of ways I could generate ideas I could stack close on shelves or arrange in a compact fashion – something linking back to those magical toys.

But what size?

Pocketeers fit in, well, a pocket. That seemed a bit too confining, and I want to make things bigger than a phone. I tried out various books, hardback and soft, held them in my hand, carried them around, and tried to imagine what it would be like if those were a few of the inventions I had in mind, and decided they were too confining as well.

I thought about the golden ratio – determined and reiterated across nature – and decided whatever size I selected should fit that in some way, just because, or at least get as close as I could get while still rounding to something that didn’t require twenty digits of decimal precision to describe.

Also, I wanted to be sure what I create could be made on the new Ultimaker I recently purchased. So, maybe I should only constrain myself to a fixed width and depth, one that would just fit the print bed. Maybe height could vary depending on whatever the invention was designed to do.

Constraint decided, I measured the print bed and determined whatever ideas or creations I designed would need to fit into a 320mm x 198mm footprint. It comes out to 1.61616161…Almost the golden ratio but…not quite.

Thinking in The Box

So, I printed a tray with those dimensions to provide a tactile, concrete example of those limits.Then, I lived with it.Seriously, I carried it around, used it as a tray for food, my glasses and phone, books, laser tubes, computer parts, anything and everything close at hand, the mundane and inspiring.At first there were a few ideas that popped in here and there...and then, the explosion.

• Microservices Cloud Trainer

• The Shroud, Mini Infrastructure Cluster (private cloud, “the shroud”)

• Machine Learning Trainer

• IOT Trainer Kit

• Micro HVAC System (evacuate the homemade electron tubes, plasma globes etc.)

• CNC Mill

• CNC Lathe

• High Voltage Power Supply (power the electron tubes, Jacobs ladder, etc)

• 3D Positioning Hub (like lighthouse?)

• Dense LiPo Power Supply

• Sterilizer

• UV Cure Box

• Mini Kiln

• Compressor with Air Tools

• Microscope (could it be electron beam?!!)

• Telescope

• Radio Telescope

• Lab Glass Shop (art that is getting lost)

• Glass Lathe (another lost art)

• Nuclear Physics Trainer

• Linear Accelerator

• Cloud Chamber

• Ultrafast Laser

• Nitrogen Laser

• Quantum Physics Trainer (entanglement?)

• Sand Table

• Spinning Art Painter

• Camera and Lightroom

• Micro Movie Set (motion control camera trainer)

• Maglev

• Hologram Lab

• Optics Lab

• Lab Stack Mechatronics

• Lab Stack Chemistry

• Lab Stack Genetics

• Culture Grower (inspired by bentolab)

• SDR Trainer

• Gearbox / Mechanisms Mechanical Linkage Trainer

• Mechanical Calculator

• Mechanical Computer (Forth? Stack based?)

• Neural Network Trainer (visual/mechanical)

• Micro Kitchen (bread maker?)

• Kombucha SCOBY Thread Maker

• Brick Spinner (grown spider silk woven into useful structures)

• Optical CNN Lab

• Reverse Gravity Maze Game

• Paper Side Scroller (classic videogames, a physical take)

• Laser Tag Set (base station and beam weapons x4)

• Small Package Big Pinball

• Anti-Poacher (computer vision remote monitoring, GPS, satellite phone data TX?)

• Automatic Component Drawers / Component Library

• Big Store (physical database)

• Parts Packager

• Automated Dpice Storage

• Phone Vault (phone charge during the night, no physical access until morning)

• Smart Pet Feeder (RFID?)

• Ultra Micro Build / Machine Center

• PCB Fab

• SLS Printer

• FDM Printer

• FDM Filament Dry Box (with auto-feed?)

• U-Can-Sculpt

• Motion Control Micro Camera

• Mural Printer (cables wrapped around pulleys, pull out and stick on wall, X,Y plotter)

• Photopolymer Printer (2.5D)

• Music Box (calliope, a modern take)

• Tool Chest

They’re in a spreadsheet, divided into nine categories with supporting detail...of course. I’m ridiculously excited about many of them, and the more I know will come as I carry this plastic tray around the house and use it for everything and anything.

With the size fixed, I didn’t have to think too deeply about how big or complex any of these things would need to be – they’d have to fit in the box. With the dimensions established, I could think more deeply along different axes. And I realized something; the human brain wants, even needs, parameters.

Too many dimensions to consider, unbounded space for example, result in too broad of thinking. You can’t even tell if the mental links you’re making are valuable. There’s too much space to freely associate. Confinement limits options and drives creativity.

I also realized that what most people make is based on solving specific problems – which is itself a constraint.

In imposing a constraint, I gave myself a concrete problem to solve with directed creativity. Fill the space and create an infinite box of ideas.

Pack it Up

Now, again, there’s some frustration that I don’t have the time and resources to build and develop all of them.

And that I don’t have the time right now to come up with another set of parameters and another list of ideas, and then go for it and build those too. And I know there will come a day where I’m so done with this tray, these dimensions, and all the projects that have come of it and I’ll be grateful to finish the last one and set the whole thing aside…but it’s not this day.

So, I’ll feed the best ideas into my project prioritization spreadsheet and decide where and what would be best to spend my time on and save the rest for later, or share some with other makers because I’d really love to see some of these things exist even if I can’t be the one who makes them real.

Anyone?

Project Prioritization Spreadsheet circa 2018