Szymon Kaliski

Tools for Novelty

• a subset of Tools for Creativity and Tools for Thinking aimed at creating new ideas, by:

  • prompting unexpected connections/results (Generativity Heuristics)
  • supporting bisociation (The Act of Creation)
  • promoting new "creative paths"

    if there are paths that users often take (...) tell them when they are making common creative moves, challenge them to find an uncommon path

    — Casual Creators - Kate Compton

  • following a "sense of beauty"
  • "responding" to inputs instead of "processing" them (Tools as Collaborators)
    • Hainbach in one of his videos describes how working with Bastl Thyme is like working with a collaborator with his own ideas

• examples in the wild:

  • Idea Collider
  • Novelty Search
  • Orca and other Esolangs
    • it's not a tool through which I'd personally compose a track, but one that promotes different approach to music, and a different way of looking at the tools I already have
    • a great example of End-User Programming Should be Task-Oriented
    • it also seems to be the result, and antithesis of how Fixating on Solution Aesthetics can Lead to Solving Wrong Problems
  • Dadaism paper bag poems
  • Oblique Strategies

• (but) also:

  The music isn't in the piano.

  — Alan Kay

  • maybe the music is in the piano, at least a bit? - we build and tune pianos in a very specific way, to support making music, and these Tools are Building Us
  • Gordon Brander argues that looking through a Cybernetic lens, the music is in a feedback loop between the piano and the player