Ideas from the Underground :: Critical Thinking Cars Essays

Ideas from the Underground Automotive designer Jerry Hirschberg was speaking to the product planning manager for marketing at Nissan about redesigning their light trucks:'Really, "I responded, growing intrigued. "Yep. Seems they use their trucks as trucks less than twenty-five percent of the time"... "What do they use them as the rest of the time?"I wondered. "Basic transportation. Cars." There. A small, barely detectable synaptic spark The truck trisected itself in my mind in to three discrete boxes: one for carrying the engine, one the driver, and one the cargo. Seen in this formulation, it became dramatically evident that the former & latter were quite ample, but between them they sandwiched a rather stingy, cramped volume for the human cargo. And yet, according to Sheldon Payne's information, it was precisely this middle box that was most important and received the greatest use. In his essay "The Three Domains of Creativity" Arthur Koestler states that, "Creativity often starts where language ends, by regressing to preverbal levels, to more fluid and uncommitted forms of mental activity." Although at that point in the essay, he is speaking of scientific creativity, later on he conveys that it can be applied to almost any kind of creativity. Take Hirshberg in the above passage as an example. He was trying to access the raw information gathered by the marketing department at Nissan about what improvements consumers wanted in the light trucks. When he got to a point where his idea began to form in his mind, he stopped talking and started visualizing how he could redesign the new model of the truck. Another example of non-verbal thinking is shown in Ron Howard's film A Beautiful Mind, where John Nash is in a bar with his friends and he reasons out his new idea that won a Nobel Prize. His reasoning on the screen is shown as images of his friends and the girls they are trying to "get", as he thinks of how they could all win. The scene mirrors how he came up with his revolutionary theory. Koestler also emphasizes this idea of the visual playing a greater part in creativity than verbal thinking with the results of an inquiry, in 1945, into the working methods of eminent mathematicians in America. He wrote, "The results showed that all of them, with only two exceptions, thought neither in verbal terms nor in algebraic symbols but relied on visual imagery of a vague, hazy kind.