Walking Through Walls¶
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Section 2, session 11, the only problem the syllabus lists that day. The reading due is Adams's Chapter 7, Blockbusters.
The problem
Reconstructed from the syllabus: the archived handout carries only the one-line schedule entry for this session, so the rounds below are rebuilt from the passage in Adams's Conceptual Blockbusting that the name most probably points to. Finish each round in your notebook before reading the next.
Round 1. A client says: design me a better door. List or sketch as many designs as you can.
Round 2. Cross out the word door. The real request turns out to be: find me a better way to get through a wall. What can you propose now that Round 1 did not allow?
Round 3. Widen it once more: find a better way to keep two spaces apart - sound, sight, heat, weather, privacy - while still letting people and things pass between them.
Round 4. Compare the three lists. What did the word door decide about shape, material, hinges and the position of the opening?
A request for a better way to get through a wall, Adams writes, "releases one from the preconception of the rectangular slab that swings or slides" (Conceptual Blockbusting, 2nd ed., 1980, p. 31).
Each statement is a special case of the next one out. Drawn for this site (CC BY 4.0).
One answer that is not a hinged slab. Theophilus Van Kannel, US Patent 387,571 (1888), via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Why it is in the course¶
Session 11 is the fifth of Section 2's six sessions, and the one where the reading turns from blocks to blockbusters. Earlier sessions used Adams's puzzles to expose perceptual, emotional, cultural and intellectual blocks. This one drills a tool for getting past them: a questioning attitude aimed not at the answer but at the problem statement.
It follows straight on from session 10, Taboo Questions and Paths Through Mazes. A maze is only a maze if you accept its walls; a door is only the answer if you accept the word "door".
The exercise has no answer. Its product is the difference between your three lists, and your account of what one word had silently decided. That suits a syllabus which says the puzzles exist "to slow you down for a few minutes so you can examine the working of your own mind".
Where it comes from¶
James L. Adams taught mechanical engineering and design at Stanford and published Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas in 1974; the fourth edition (2001) was the one in print when the course ran. His chapter on perceptual blocks has a section on the tendency to delimit the problem area too closely, and the door is his example. Ask for a better door and the answers stay inside the word: a hinged slab with a handle. Ask instead for a better way to get through a wall, and his students varied the opening itself - its shape, and whether the thing that closes it swings at all. Widen the request once more, from opening a wall to keeping two spaces separate, and the question becomes what the wall is for rather than what a door looks like.
The example became a standard classroom drill, reproduced in Dennis Coon's Introduction to Psychology. The title, though, is probably Winfree's own. It echoes Marcel Ayme's 1941 story Le Passe-muraille, "The Man Who Walked Through Walls", though nothing links the two.
Hints
- First write down every property a "door" has that nobody asked for: shape, material, how it moves, that it is one thing.
- In Round 2, change one property of the opening at a time: shape, size, height off the floor, whether it moves or the person does.
- In Round 3, ask what the wall is for. Cold, noise, sight and strangers are different jobs, and each suggests a different way through.
- Count the ideas in each round. That count is the result, not any one design.
Resolution
There is no single answer. What you can compare your notebook against is what Adams reports. Asked for a better door, people stay inside the word: a hinged slab, better made. Asked for a better way through a wall, his students varied the opening itself - other shapes, curtains and shutters, doors that rotate or fold rather than swing. Asked for a better way to keep two spaces separate, they could reach answers that are not openings at all; Adams's example is the air curtain that keeps warm air inside a shop while people walk straight through it. At that width the statement even invites the question of whether the two spaces need walling apart.
His moral is that it is foolish to constrain a problem so closely that the solver's abilities go unused, and that this holds just as much when the person stating the problem and the person solving it are the same. Every statement carries a picture of its answer inside it.
Sources¶
- James L. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas, 2nd ed. (1980), pp. 31-32 - Google Books search-inside 🔒
- James L. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting, 2nd ed. (1980) - Internet Archive 🔓 (borrow)
- James L. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting, 4th ed., 2001 Perseus printing - Internet Archive 🔓 (borrow)
- James L. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting, 5th ed. (2019) - Google Books preview 🔒
- James L. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting - publisher page, Basic Books / Hachette 🔒
- Dennis Coon, Introduction to Psychology: Exploration and Application, 8th ed. (1998) - Google Books 🔒
- Arthur T. Winfree, course handout (the syllabus) for EEB 479/479H/579 (2001), archived 20 April 2002 - Internet Archive 🔓 · transcribed at the schedule
- Theophilus Van Kannel, US Patent 387,571, "Storm-door structure" (1888) - Google Patents 🔓
- Wikipedia contributors, "Revolving door" - Wikipedia 🔓
- Wikipedia contributors, "Le Passe-muraille" - Wikipedia 🔓
How sure are we that this is Winfree's problem?
The syllabus gives only one row for this session: Adams Chapter 7, Blockbusters, as the reading, and Walking Through Walls as the sole problem. Winfree's handout is archived, but it carries that same schedule row and no problem text, so his own wording is lost. The identification is probable: it rests on the match between his title and Adams's "a better way to get through a wall", on Adams being the reading assigned in the same row, and on Adams's own report that he set the restated problem to students.
Against it: that passage sits in Adams's Chapter 2, read back at session 7, not the Chapter 7 assigned here, and Winfree wrote "walking" where Adams wrote "get through".
The live alternative is a joke continuing session 10: having found Paths Through Mazes under the rules, students are invited to walk through the walls instead. Nothing supports that beyond the two names sitting in consecutive sessions, but the teaching point above holds either way.
Back to Section 2 · All problems · The schedule
Machine-readable: this page as Markdown · raw source on GitHub · llms.txt · llms-full.txt (whole site). See For AI agents.