The Klondike Space

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The Klondike Space

• Creative Process In Product Design

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Form a team of 5 to 6 members
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The Klondike Game

• Heres is Klondike and you know that the mother
  lode is somewhere around

Klondike is located on the outskirts of Dawson
City, Yukon Territory, Canada
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Game Rules

• The board is Klondike and you are looking for the
  mother lode (the main vein of gold ore)
• The mother lode is denoted by
• By overturning a piece, you dig up and sieve a
  small patch of land
• The pieces may be empty or may have one of these
  dot patterns
• Dot patterns denote the amount of gold trace
  found in that piece, more dots, more gold
• Increase in gold trace may imply higher
  probability of the mother lode being around, but
  not necessarily reflects the actual distance from
  it

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How to Win

• You have 150 to begin with
• Overturning a piece adjacent to your last move
  costs you 1
• Overturning a piece NOT next to your current
  location costs you 6
• The team who has found the mother lode with the
  least amount of time and money is the winner

If this is your last move
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Resources Record Sheet

• Cross out the resources used for mining each
  piece of land 1 unit for adjacent piece and 6
  units for the others

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 6 6 6
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 6 6 6
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 6 6 6
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 6 6 6
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 6 6 6
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 6 6 6
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Before You Begin

• Each team elects a leader
• The leader choose 1 assistants
• The duty of leader and assistants
• Make sure that the players do not overturn the
  board
• Record the spending
• Observe how the players search for gold
• You have 15 minutes

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Discussion

• What had happened
• What strategies employed

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Winning Strategies
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Strategies previous groups employed

• Digging randomly
• Blanket search (spiral, zigzag, etc.)
• Minesweeper style boundary expanding search
• Resource cost equivalent sampling

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Klondike and Homing Search

• Before any gold was found, the search was random
  (and thus a Klondike search)
• As soon as promising clues are found - e.g.
  finding traces of gold - the method of searching
  shifts to that of Homing.
• The presence of gold traces in a riverbed is an
  example of how the local terrain provides homing
  clues (local gradient) to help point the
  prospector to the mother lode

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The process of innovation is, virtually by
definition, filled with uncertainty it is a
journey of exploration into a strange land.Ken
ArrowNobel Prizewinning economist
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The Terrain

• Klondike Space is an analogy used by David
  Perkins to describe the creative activities
• A person searching for solution to a problem
  believes that an optimal solution is out there,
  but has no idea where the solution lays
• The gradient of the local terrain is a measure of
  how close the current solution to the optimal
  solution is in terms of performance

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Rarity Problem

• Flatland, no guidance provided by local contours,
  i.e. no solution at sight

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Plateau Problem

• Terrain flats out after a series of optimisation,
  progress stalled

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Isolation Problem

• Immense difficulties that cannot be circumvented

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Oasis Problem

• Terrain points to a sub-optimal solution

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Discussion

• Can you think of a situation similar to each of
  the 4 scenarios?

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Creative Obstacles

• Problems
• Rarity problem
• Plateau problem
• Isolation problem
• Oasis problem
• The system that can search a Klondike Space and
  overcome the above 4 problems is said to be
  CREATIVE

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"If you don't know where you are going,then any
path will take you there."- Lewis Carroll
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Further references

• There are some interesting books written or
  edited by David Perkins on creativity in our
  library
• T49.5.I6 1992 Inventive minds
• BF441 .P46 2000 Archimedes' bathtub
• LB1590.3 .P47 1986 Knowledge as design
• Discussions on Klondike and homing in the context
  of TRIZ
• http//www.triz-journal.com/archives/2002/02/b/ind
  ex.htm

A full description on Klondike space can be
found in the The Topography of Invention
chapter of the book Inventive Minds