Discovering Da Vinci

Discovering Da Vinci

The blood soaks into the paper cube.
Damn it! I need to slow down.
There’s no way my hands can keep up with my head.

Sitting at my desk on star-filled summer night, I pick up the band-aid with which to wrap my finger. With a moment to reflect, I ask myself, ‘How am I going to fix this problem? For every polyhedron I make, a dozen new ideas pop up. I’m drowning in them.’
“I just need to get organized, I tell myself. That’s all.”

But if I knew how to do that, I wouldn’t have this problem in the first place.
I need help.
I take Thinkertoys, Cracking Creativity by Michael Michalko, and Sparks of Genius by Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein from my bookshelf. Flipping through their pages one at a time, I look for answers. I’ve read them before, but maybe I missed something.

Systems thinking, analogical thinking, interdisciplinary thinking, Nothing new there. Nothing that can help right now.

Then something stops me—on pages 121-23, there is a passage about da Vinci in Cracking Creativity.
Wait. How did I miss this?

According to Michalko, da Vinci used a table to systematically combine exaggerated features for his caricatures. He’d write things like “long nose” and “floppy ears” across the top row, and “beady eyes” and “pointy chin” down the first column—then combine them (Table 1).

Oh! it’s an idea multiplier, I realize. Just like a multiplication table, but for ideas. Damn that powerful!

I grab a pencil. Draw a 4x4 table. In the top left corner, I write “Combine.”
Across the top row, I write cube, dodecahedron.
Down the left side, I write squares, pentagons
And then, cell by cell, I start combining them—just like da Vinci (Table 2)..

I grab more poster board. Draw and cut out the polygons. Then glue them together to form the polyhedral structures.

Now I don’t just know what to create—I know what to create it with.
Eureka it’s a 3 in 1 table I can use to build, multiply, and organize ideas with it.

This isn’t like the multiplication table I memorized in first grade. This is new. It’s dynamic.

What else can I do with it, I wonder?