The current issue of Mechanical Engineering Magazine Online has an interesting article by Emily Smith on the subject of TRIZ. Hey, I’d never heard of it, either. TRIZ is an acronym for the Russian equivalent of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, developed in 1946 by Genrich Altshuller, a 20-year-old inventor who decided to analyze patent applications to discern patterns in the processes that applicants had used to come up with the designs they were trying to patent. Convinced that the process of design and invention could be defined by more than creativity and luck, Altshuller decided to study only the patents that introduced a new application of science. He organized his study of 40,000 patents according to patterns of design and the principles in these innovative solutions. From that, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving was born.

TRIZ uses 40 principles and 39 parameters. In TRIZ, all design problems involve some sort of contradiction. A product must be stronger but lighter–known as a technical contradiction–or needs to be of higher quality but lower cost–an administrative contradiction. “It’s like mathematics,” said Michael Slocum, a TRIZ instructor and a central figure in European TRIZ efforts as well as a consultant to American users of this product design methodology. Like math, TRIZ “has a number of technical and nontechnical applications,” Slocum explained. “It reduces creativity to an exact science.” And like math, he added, “The more you know, the more powerful it is.” While the idea of ‘reducing creativity to an exact science’ may sound disturbingly like it belongs with old “New Soviet Man” dogma and Social Realism art, perhaps there’s some insights to be gained from TRIZ that would have applications in building the minds of robots – or perhaps understanding our own.