Claude Shannon once told me that as a kid, he remembered being stuck on a jigsaw puzzle. His brother, who was passing by, said to him:  `You know: I could tell you something.’ That’s all his brother said. Yet that was enough hint to help Claude solve the puzzle.—Manuel Blum, Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student

1. Transposition – moving established ideas or solutions to a new domain. Witness how ancient, washed-up apps from the PC have become fresh and profitable on the iPhone. I used to play a really simple, really fun game called Tank Wars for hours and days in the 1990s. It’s an incredibly simple game. I could easily have written my own iPhone version, but the thought never occurred to me. Guess what? iShoot, a fancy port of Tank Wars to the iPhone, made someone rich. Similar opportunities have arisen in translating popular iPhone apps for Android, or transposing successful business models from developed markets to developing ones, as Yandex has done with Google’s business.
2. Combination – novel synergy. Chocolate and peanut-butter anyone?
3. Abstraction – seeing a broader pattern. This is the bread and butter of computer science and mathematics. Object-oriented programming is one example Category theory is another.
4. Discovery – foregrounding the invisible. Behold the Higgs boson!
5. Transformation – seeing old problems from a new vista. For example, view the problem from the standpoint of one of its elements or actors. (Compare Wikipedia’s view of transformation.)
   

   When Jonas Salk was asked how he invented the vaccine for polio he replied, ‘I imagined myself as a virus or cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.’ How to Think What Nobody Else Thinks

6. Transmogrification – changing the rules of the game. This goes beyond problem solving (getting better at playing the game) to problem setting (creating a new game entirely). Forget about improving the efficiency of your vacuum tubes and start building integrated circuits.
7. Distillation - Simplification to bare essentials. See How to cut features and enjoy it.
8. Specialization - emphasizing an extant characteristic. Evolution is rich with examples of disparate selection pressures producing wildly divergent forms from a common ancestral design. Look at dugongs and elephants, products of pleiotropy.
9. Opposition – opposing an existing paradigm. This is a great way to attract innovators from the “I’m different” camp. Apple once had, and still has to some extent, a magic born of opposing Microsoft.
10. Provocation – creating problems, then offering the solution. What would happen if Symantec, makers of anti-virus software, were caught writing a virus? Consider Parkinson’s Law.
11. ADAD – analog to digital and back. Charming solutions arise when digital products mimic the analog, or when analog products mimic the digital. (The early prototypes of digital speech-to-text systems were created with a microphone and a remote human typist.)
12. Biomimicry – a form of transposition and ADAD that looks to nature for design solutions. See my other biomimicry posts.
13. Tantalization – suggesting that a solution exists, often without proof. “You know:  I could tell you something.”
14. Play – changing the stakes, terms and rewards of the problem-solving process to improve the psychological valence of the problem solvers. Stress induces depth-first thinking. Positive affect induces broad, creative thinking.
15. Constraint – Limiting resources to promote efficiency and fresh thinking. See Design for the bottom of the pyramid on mars, Parkinson’s Law.
16. Audacity – embrace the impossible. Aim for an ideal goal without the slightest hindrance of reason or feasibility. Envision how the problem would be solved with magic, or the power of design fiction.
    

    The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.George Bernard Shaw