Recreation; Applied Imagination

CHAPTER I.2

Imagination is more important than knowledge - Albert Einstein

     Principles and Procedures of Creative Problem-Solving.

 Imagination made America 

It was only about 500 years ago that Europe began to rate the power of thinking, and especially creative thinking, on a par with the power of brute force. It was this new attitude that gave vitality to the Renaissance. North America was the lucky beneficiary of the world's creative upsurge. As The New Yorker has said, "Ideas are what the United States are made of." Without doubt, our new heights in standard of living have been reached through creative thinking. One idea inherited by America from Europe was a way to use fire by means of an internal combustion engine. This gave birth to our automotive industry, without which America's standard of living would be far lower. For it alone gives gainful occupation to over 9,000,000 of us.  Agricultural ideas have made far richer the rich soil of our country. The creative genius poured into farm machinery by the McCormicks and the Deeres has enabled each farm hand to run out far more food and formerly. When America was young, it took 19 farmers to feed once city dweller. 

Today 19 farmers produce enough food for themselves and 66 other people. Who in 1990 could have foreseen the changes in America that have since come about? From horse and buggy to car and plane and jet, from railroads and railway mail to transatlantic telephone and radio and television, from slow boat to the Queen Mary. (And now, more passengers fly the Atlantic than cross by boat.) From gas lamps to indirect lighting, from sulphur-and-molasses to sulfathiazole, from hand-wound victrolas to hi-fi, from palm-leaf fans to air-conditioning, from coal to stoves to electric ranges built into the wall, from cold cellars to home freezers, from ear to trumpets to transistors. And yet, it is only recently that the value of imagination has been fully recognized even in America. A few years ago, the Chrysler Corporation started to hail imagination as "the directing force" which "lights tomorrow's roads, explores today for clues to tomorrow, hunts better ways for you to live and travel." And the Aluminum Company has recently adopted a newly coined word, "imagineering," which means that 

"you let your imagination soar and then engineer it down to earth. You think about the things you used to make and decide that if you don't find out some way to make them immeasurably better, you may never be asked by your customers to make them again" Thus, competition has forced American business to recognize the importance of conscious creative effort. So much so, that, more and more, the heart and center of almost every successful manufacturing company is its creative research. Industrial research used to do but little more than take things apart in order to find out what caused what and why."

The new research adds to such fact-finding a definite and conscious creative function aimed to discover new facts, arrive at new combinations, find new application. Thanks to thinker like Doctor James B. Conant, imagination's importance to science is now recognized as never before. Chapter I.3 Public Problems Need Creativity But, alas, the newest and most pressing problems of our nation are not so much the improvement of things as the solution of people-problems. Overshadowing all such is our international impasse. We are applying plenty of research to this, but in the ineffective form of merely finding facts and making diagnoses. To arrive at new and good ideas which might solve the world's people-problems, there is conscious creative effort at all comparable to what scientific research is doing to better the products we use. 

We'll explore and deplore, only that and nothing more said a cynical senator concerning our national habit of going all out in fact-finding, and then petering out when it comes to applying creative thinking to the facts as found. In discussing this with David Lawrence, he remarked: In Washington in 1993, I had the opportunity of seeing thousands of letters received by congressman, government officials, editors and columnists, all discussing the country's difficulties. The interesting fact was this. All the writers devoted some time to analyzing the causes of the situation and very intelligently, too, although all did not agree. However, once they had made such an analysis, they seemed to have expended their energy. The creative spark so badly needed was sadly lacking." "The fundamental issue of our time," said Raymond Fodick, "is wether we can develop understanding and wisdom reliable enough to serve as a chart in working out the problems of human relations."