Connecting the Dots

To connect the dots is to relate facts, images or ideas that seemed unrelated until a meaning emerges from the whole. The expression comes from the children's puzzle in which a figure appears as numbered points are joined by a line. In everyday language it describes both reasoning step by step toward a conclusion and the sudden insight that links distant things, which is why it is often used to explain how creative ideas are born.

Design.0 uses the image in its section on semiotics and again in its section on creative logic. When analyzing a feather, the author writes that an infinite amount of associations can be made through creativity and that the capacity to connect dots in a way that is not logical, but that pertains to meanings and symbolism, is the most fundamental skill of a creative.

Later, the same image separates the two modes of thinking the article compares. Vertical thinking connects dots in a linearity of logical information, where every dot validates each other; lateral thinking connects distant dots in a non-linear way. To think creatively, the article says, regards connecting dots that were never connected before.