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What Alan Turing Teaches us about Problem Solving
Occasionally the mind needs to wander, be allowed to stray from the familiar pasture and seek answers that are found where they are not expected. That is a lesson that "design thinking" teaches us. So it happened that after watching the movie "the Imitation Game" in which it's protagonist Alan Turing makes remarkable progress in problem solving, it seemed that the film offers inadvertently a set of instructive lessons about how to solve problems and how to design, neatly packaged for evening entertainment, no less. |
| Alan Turing, Mathematician |
Alan Turing was a British mathematical genius, who can be seen as the inventor of the computer (Turing Machine) and definitely was the one who broke the German WW II code which was produced with an encrypting machine called Enigma. Although dead since 1954 his name has been in the news lately because of a pardon Queen Elizabeth gave him posthumously in 2013 (he had been convicted of "indecency" because of homosexual contacts), and because the film "The Imitation Game", a chronicle of his life was released recently. This impressive film streamlines the historic Turing story into the kind of drama that fits the model of a movie narrative; a more accurate chronicle of Turing may be found in Andrew Hodges book about him but the film account it easy to distill 10 general lessons about the design process.
1. Creative solutions don't happen in a command structure
The film gets a lot of mileage from contrasting the officers who want to enforce order, discipline and obedience with Turing who is impervious to their efforts. At one points he ....
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Klaus Philipsen FAIA
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
Baltimore MD
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