Don't Break the Box...

Reimagine, then remake it!

…the essential fact has been overlooked that every human is potentially a genius.
- Fritz Zwicky

Fritz Zwicky ¹, a Swiss astronomer, was an idea fount and credited his creativity to a conceptual tool he’d created.

Let’s call it the Zwicky Box.

To show you the box in action, I’ve taken an excerpt from Michael Michalko’s book, ThinkerToys. ²

Choose a challenge, then decide on the important parameters and write them in columns, finally you list down all the variations under each parameter.

Let’s break that down into steps:

Step 1: Specify the challenge

Step 2: Decide the parameters or categories and add them one to a column
Choose parameters that most affect your challenge

Step 3: List down in rows the variations or options under each parameter

Note: The more the parameters and variations, the more complex the box becomes. Keep it simple. More is not necessarily better.

Step 4: Randomly pick one or more variations from under each parameter, combine them, ideate.

Michalko gives the example of a marketing director of a laundry-hamper making company that’s looking for new designs.

Step 1: Challenge - Designing a new laundry hamper

Step 2: Parameters chosen - Material. Shape. Finish. Position where it is placed.

Step 3: Five variations for each parameter

Step 4: Randomly combining net, cylindrical, painted, and on door gives an idea for a basketball type net that’s hooked to a cylindrical hoop and attached to the door. You can now play basketball with your dirty laundry.

Image by Vinícius Vieira ft for pexels

Two more examples of a Zwicky box:

• figuring out who to build an app for and for what purpose

• deciding on an effective power supply system

“Zwicky believed that if only we could free ourselves from our pedestrian patterns of thought… the future could be shaped by our images – however bold – rather than by the inertias of existing institutions and investments.”
- Jesse L. Greenstein, Remembering Zwicky

1. Zwicky worked most of his life at the California Institute of Technology, where he made many important contributions in theoretical and observational astronomy. He produced hundreds of publications over his long career, covering a great breadth of topics. He was the first to infer the existence of unseen dark matter, neutron stars, and gravitational lenses.

2. Michalko calls it an ‘Idea Box’