The concept of association is at the heart of many of today's powerful ICT technologies such as information retrieval and data mining. These technologies typically employ association by similarity or co-occurrence to discover new information relevant to the evidence already known to the user. However, association techniques fail to discover relevant information that is not related in obvious associative ways, in particular information that is related across different contexts. It is these kinds of context-crossing “associations” that are often needed in innovative domains.
Domains that are characterized by the need to develop innovative solutions require a form of creative information discovery from increasingly complex, heterogeneous and geographically distributed information sources. These domains, including design and engineering (drugs, materials, processes, devices), areas involving art (fashion and entertainment), and scientific discovery disciplines, require a different ICT paradigm that can help users to uncover, select, re-shuffle, and combine diverse contents to synthesize new features and properties leading to creative solutions. People working in these areas employ creative thinking to connect seemingly unrelated information, for example, by using metaphors or analogical reasoning. These modes of thinking allow the mixing of conceptual categories and contexts, which are normally separated. The functional basis for these modes is a mechanism called bisociation (see Arthur Koestler - The Act of Creation).
Bisociation refers to the mixture of concepts from two contexts or categories of objects that are normally considered separate by the literal processes of the mind. Koestler coined the term bisociation to distinguish the type of metaphoric thinking that leads to the acts of great creativity from familiar associative thinking. Bisociation, according to Koestler, “means to join unrelated, often conflicting, information in a new way.
| Habit (association) | Originality (bisociation) |
|---|---|
| Association with the confines of a given matrix | Bisociation of independent matrices |
| Guidance by pre-conscious or extra-conscious processes | Guidance by sub-conscious processes normally under restraint |
| Dynamic equilibrium | Activation of regenerative potentials |
| Rigid to flexible variations on the theme | Super-flexibility (reculer pour mieux sauter) |
| Repetitiveness | Novelty |
| Conservative | Destructive-constructive |
The history of engineering and science is full of serendipitous discoveries, which are based on bisociative processes. Arguably, the most well-known ones are the anecdotal falling apple that gave Newton the inspiration for his theory of gravitation, and Archimedes’ bisociations between the concept of specific weight and his body displacing water in the bathtub. Other serendipitous discoveries include penicillin, Viagra, aspartame (artificial sweeteners), and many more.