I wanted a good reference book on creativity. I wanted a book that I could recommend when teaching people about intellitech.
I have engaged in research on intellectual productivity for 10 years at Cybozu.
I held a workshop on how to organize and output ideas at the Summer Design School of Kyoto University. I taught college students how to create new knowledge by research as a part-time lecturer at Tokyo Metropolitan University. However, in the limited time, I can not tell them what I want to tell. If I introduce many reference books, they don’t read everything. I want a book that contains what I want to teach.
I do not know a good book. If I can recommend only one book, I choose Jiro Kawakita’s How to make ideas, but this book was written in 1966. The abstract way of thinking is still valuable, but the concrete methodology is based on the technology of 50 years ago. Many people feel the book is obsolete. I need a book for the next 50 years.
If something does not exist, it is an opportunity to make it yourself.
I wrote Programming Languages: Their Core Concepts in 2013, which compares programming languages to tell core concepts in them. This book is a long seller. It still selling even after five years since its release. There is no doubt that I create long-lasting knowledge in the process of writing. Let’s explain the method used in the writing process so that other people can use it.
When writing the book, I used a modified KJ method, which originally introduced by Jiro Kawakita. Additionally, I described two approaches in the book. One is the approach to understand what is different and what does not change by comparing multiple programming languages. Another is the approach to focus on the purpose why the programming language created. Because when authors create the programming language, they have their purpose, in other word, problems they want to solve.
Now, let’s make the same approach for intellitech instead of programming language. The plan of this book started like this.