The Klondike Space
Creative Process In Product
Design
Form a team of 5 to 6
members
The Klondike Game
 Here’s is Klondike* and you know that the
mother lode is somewhere around
*Klondike is located on the outskirts of Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada
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
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
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If this is your last move
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
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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
Discussion
What had happened
What strategies employed
Winning Strategies
Strategies previous groups employed
 Digging randomly
 Blanket search (spiral, zigzag, etc.)
 ‘Minesweeper’ style boundary expanding
search
 Resource cost equivalent sampling
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
“The process of innovation is,
virtually by definition, filled with
uncertainty; it is a journey of
exploration into a strange land.”
Ken Arrow
Nobel Prize–winning economist
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
Rarity Problem
 Flatland, no
guidance provided
by local contours, i.e.
no solution at sight
Plateau Problem
 Terrain flats out after a series of
optimisation, progress stalled
Isolation Problem
 Immense difficulties
that cannot be
circumvented
Oasis Problem
 Terrain points to a
sub-optimal solution
Discussion
Can you think of a situation similar to each
of the 4 scenarios?
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
"If you don't know where you are going,
then any path will take you there."
- Lewis Carroll
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/index.htm
* A full description on Klondike space can be found in the “The Topography of
Invention” chapter of the book “Inventive Minds”