Henry Ford famously used the paradigm of meat packing to find a better way of building a car. Essentially it inverted the notion that mechanics walked around a single car, gradually constructing it over a period of months. Under Ford’s system, it was the converse; cars proceeded like cow carcasses from one specialised process to the next. Where cows were disassembled, cars were being assembled. By seeing a car as a relatively low value object he could transform its production, and produce the world’s first high volume automobile.
The pregnant man visual (top right) was part of an Health Education Council to reduce unwanted pregnancies. The headline ran “Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?” Copywriter Jeremy Sinclair, (Saatchi’s). By exploiting the symmetry of an imaginary situation, there’s an unarguable case for being more careful with contraception.
Below, bottom left, mushroom as jet engine. This visual idea was used both by British Airways to sell its food services, and also by HSBC to discuss organic fuel sources in the future. The BA idea ran “Before we fuel the aircraft, we fuel the passenger”. The HSBC campaign creatively recycled it, with the line “In future, we will all fly organic.” Anyway, the point is that strong ideas discover and exploit meaningful symmetry. See conceptual symmetries and Darwin
See also Ideas