Abstract concepts do not have a physical form. When we bring them closer to concrete physical sensations, they often give rise to parables. Why? Because abstract concepts do not have a physical form, they cannot be captured by the physical senses. By trying to grasp them with our physical senses, we come to use objects with physical forms in place of the concepts. In parables, words are used to mean something different from their common meaning. By this uncommon use, your experience, which has not yet taken the form of words, barely partially takes the form of words.
In (6.2.3.1) draw a picture, I showed the experiment to draw creativity. In the experiment the parable of plants and the parable of nuclear fusion came out. James Webb Young also compared the process of idea creation to coral reefs. A beautiful coral reef suddenly appears in the blue ocean. The idea also appears abruptly. The coral reefs are made by uncountable small coral worms in the ocean. Ideas are also the last fruit of uncountable small activities that progress under consciousness.
Parable stories are sometimes called metaphors or analogies. (*21)
Analogy is association of similar things. Young thought about the process of idea creation in the analogy of coral reefs. In this chapter, I tell the process of idea creation with analogy of producing crops in a farm. A parable story is to explain the contents that you want to convey in correspondence with similar things.
Analogy is a common way to create ideas. Katharina Kalogerakis and colleagues from the Hamburg University of Technology interviewed 16 project leaders of design and engineering consulting firms and confirmed that 12 of them frequently use analogy. They also found that when analogies were made in distant fields such as industrial products and animals, the novelty of the product was high.
-
*21 Sometimes, the concept of metaphor is distinguished from the simile. In the case, a metaphor is a parable that does not state that it is a parable. For example, “warm ideas” is a metaphor. As a simile, “the idea is like an egg. When it is created, it does not move at first. By warming, it becomes a chick and begins to move on its own.” However, this distinction between the metaphor and the simile is not important in this book. You can think the metaphor is the parable.
-
*22 Katharina Kalogerakis, Christian Lüthje and Cornelius Herstatt. (2010). “Developing innovations based on analogies: experience from design and engineering consultants”. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 27(3), 418-436.