Bisociation

Bisociation is a concept and homonym technique that consists of creating associations out of unrelated mind processes, contexts or categories to discover new unexplored information ideas and solutions. Bisociation is a term coined by Arthur Koestler in his 1964 book "The Act of Creation". The concept has been developed after the conceptual failure of traditional creativity techniques based on association by similarity.

When associations of information are not of an obvious nature, especially when relations are among different contexts, Bisociation can help to find a great creative idea. According to Koestler, Bisociation literally means "to join unrelated, often conflicting, information in a new way." Koestler suggested that by using association of pictures and terms from different and apparently unconnected contexts, it is really possible to create something innovative and original. The concept's scope and strength, similarly to Rätselvermehrung, is to discover breakthrough ideas, unlock mental habits (Congnitive Biases) and disengage immediate or familiar associations.

Association versus Bisociation (Koestler 1976:113)
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).

See Also

Brainstorming
Rätselvermehrung
Problem Tree Analysis
Metaplan Method
Mind Mapping
Bisociation
SHARP (Structured, Holistic Approach for a Research Proposal)