One of the inventive principles you can use to stimulate creativity is substitution. It works like this: you’re about to drive a nail into the wall, but you don’t have a hammer. Instead, use a wrench for that purpose. Your child is watching and learning an important life lesson: Imagination allows us to use an object in a way that was never intended.
When a job is performed using tools that were not specifically designed for the task, the substituted objects are called “field files.”
When I was a child, my dad worked in a mill in a large port city. He built several wooden structures that are still used on the great seagoing ships of the time. My father was a kind of 20th century shipwright.
Good at what he did, his company saw an opportunity to promote their business by sending my father to an official competition, sponsored by the woodworking industry in general. I was so proud when Dad won the contest for the title of best carpenter in our state that year!
When I asked my father about the event, he told me that the critical test that allowed him to outperform his competition was the “Field Records” section. Because he couldn’t afford many tools in his youth, my father became adept at using his imagination to do jobs without the “proper” equipment.
It is in our youth that we learn inventive principles best, especially through the practice of substitution.
I once spent a golden summer on the beautiful island of Anguilla in the Caribbean. I remember a girl of about six years old, poor, barefoot and pushing a rudimentary set of wooden wheels in the sand, from the end of a stick that she had fixed to a simple twig axle.
“What’s that?” I asked her.
“It’s a roller,” she answered with an expression that indicated disbelief. How could an American be dumb enough not to understand a homemade rolling toy?
Children today rarely get a chance to use their minds in play. Substitutions are not necessary in a world where highly detailed toys leave nothing to the imagination. Dad isn’t short of the right equipment for every job either, and of course Mom has a fully stocked kitchen with the latest gadgets for any contingency.
A powerful way to teach inventive principles is to let children loose in a forest, without their toys, but that doesn’t happen anymore, does it?
Perhaps our imaginations go numb in part because we rarely find it necessary to imagine substitutions these days.