Fringe ideas

In her book An Anatomy of Inspiration Rosamund Harding (1898-1982), an English musical scholar, sets out to reverse-engineer the mechanisms of creativity through the direct experiences of famous creators across art, science, and literature. In so doing, Harding finds common threads of creativity emphasising its combinatorial nature and its reliance on eclectic knowledge. She holds: 'Originality depends on new and striking combinations of ideas. It is obvious therefore that the more a man knows the greater scope he has for arriving at striking combinations.' Harding continues: ' Success depends on adequate knowledge: that is, it depends on sufficient knowledge of the special subject, and a variety of extraneous knowledge to produce new and original combinations of ideas.' Moreover, she writes: 'The variety of interests tends to increase the richness of these extra ideas — ‘fringe-ideas’ — associated with the subject and thus to increase the possibilities of new and original combinations of thought'. Harding's findings suggest support for knowledge-based ideation while debunking the genius-myth of creativity*. That is, in-born creative ability is not enough by itself without a solid foundation of knowledge obtained by experience or study. But more than this, in the age of artificial intelligence, designers draw inspiration from a raft of genAI applications, such as Dall-E, which, given their combinatorial nature, help produce what Harding calls 'fringe ideas'. *Research trends, originally outlined by Graham Wallace (1926) suggest five major stages of creativity: Preparation (idea generation), Incubation (gestation period), Illumination (the "Aha! moment"), Evaluation (idea development) and Verification (idea communication).