Book: Synectics: The Development of Creative Capacity
Meaning: joining together different and apparently unrelated elements
We noticed that, in launching a series of sessions which culminated in the successful solution of a given problem, we were constantly attempting to “make the familiar strange”. Faced with the all too familiar, without understanding entirely what we were doing, we would attempt at first radically to shift our vision so that the familiar (the codified, the set world of the usual) was made strange and new, and therefore subject to new patterns and new laws of operation—subject to invention.
According to Gordon, the Synectics process involves two things:
- making the strange familiar and
- making the familiar strange.
Playing with metaphor, he believed, is the best way to do that: "Ultimate solutions to problems are rational, the process of finding them is not."
Gordon and Prince founded a company called “Synectics” to develop defamiliarization as a tool for developing new products and devising more efficient manufacturing processes. Synectics still exists. Now known as Synecticsworld and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the company helps corporations invent and innovate through metaphor—new products and services, new strategies, new business models, new ways to gain insight into what consumers and customers want and need.