Imagining the future
With an environment for nurturing creative ideas in place, the question remains of where the ideas themselves come from.
Hsueh points out that while the inspiration for ideas seems to come from nowhere, a scrutiny of history reveals that outbursts of creativity have often occurred in the gray area where two different fields converge.
For example, the discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953 overlapped the fields of expertise of biologist James Watson and physicist Francis Crick, who inspired each other. As another example, Apple Computer founder Steven Jobs successfully combined music technology, a user interface, and industrial design in directing development of the iPod, the most popular consumer electronics product of recent years, creating a product that is also a trendy objet d'art.
Interdisciplinary cooperation has become a defining feature of the current era, and the Creativity Lab's operations began by "collecting" a group of peculiar people.
A graduate of National Taiwan University's Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, Arthur Y.H. Cheng is typical of the eccentrics at the Creativity Lab. Formerly a university instructor, he was recruited by the lab after presenting a monograph called "Technologically Advanced Countries and Imaginatively Advanced Countries" at a conference organized two years ago by the Center for SF Studies at National Chiao Tung University.
Inquisitive since he was a child, Cheng frequents cinemas in Taipei's Hsimenting district, and researches American and Japanese science fiction cartoons, movies, robots, and video games. He often laments that the Chinese-speaking world rarely produces works of science fiction that can stand with those from America or Japan.
"Ninety percent of science fiction explores the world of the future. Technology is a tool for building a bridge to the future. Yet there is hardly any discussion in the Chinese-speaking world about what sort of revolutionary changes will be brought by technology. Is this not alarming?" he asks.
"I believe that imagination about the future and business innovation are definitely related. And works of science fiction can aid people in coming up with technology ideas," he says. Cheng points out that people in Japan first imagined a world with robots before beginning to actually produce them. By 2000, Japan had 153 companies manufacturing robots. In the US, the television series Lost in Space and the novel Childhood's End (which partially inspired the film 2001: A Space Odyssey) appeared not long before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.
The exhibit called "Water Machine" is a mechanical boat that resembles a ray fish. Because its surface is smooth, it can move forward rapidly when propelled by a pump. Horus Shu, its inventor, says that with 70% of the Earth's surface covered by seas, objects modeled on marine creatures will be helpful in future deep-sea scientific research.