Credits & Intellectual Traditions
ThinkFu draws on ideas, principles, and methods from established traditions in metacognition, systematic innovation, creativity research, and design. Each move attributes its intellectual origins in its frontmatter.
No copyrighted text is reproduced in the catalog. Where a move is inspired by a specific technique, principle, or framework, ThinkFu provides its own original procedures, examples, and framing. The ideas are credited; the expression is ours.
Traditions & Sources
- TRIZ (Genrich Altshuller, 1956–1984) — systematic innovation principles and contradiction resolution
- Oblique Strategies (Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt, 1975) — creative perturbation through indirect prompts
- Lateral Thinking (Edward de Bono) — techniques for breaking fixation and generating alternatives
- Design Thinking — human-centered problem-solving methodology
- Systems Thinking (Donella Meadows, Peter Senge) — feedback loops, leverage points, system archetypes
- Metacognition research (John Flavell, Gregory Schraw) — thinking about thinking
- Classical philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Hegel) — dialectic, elenchus, and the synthesis of opposites
- Argumentation theory (Mercier & Sperber, Charlan Nemeth) — reasoning as social exchange, authentic dissent
- Improv theater (Keith Johnstone, Viola Spolin) — spontaneity, status, offers and blocks
- Christopher Alexander — pattern languages, wholeness, and the nature of living structure
- Cognitive science (Daniel Kahneman, Gary Klein, Marin Kapur) — heuristics, recognition-primed decision making, productive failure
- Writing craft — editing principles from a long tradition of practitioners
- Constructionism (Seymour Papert, Mitch Resnick) — learning through making, tinkering, and play
- Zen Buddhism — koan practice and contemplative inquiry
- Music & performance (John Cage, Miles Davis, Claude Debussy) — silence, accident, and constraint as creative forces
Ideas vs. Expression
Copyright protects expression, not ideas. You cannot copyright a thinking technique, a problem-solving principle, or a cognitive strategy. ThinkFu's catalog consists of original procedures built on ideas that belong to the intellectual commons — many of them centuries old, all of them enriched by the practitioners listed above.
We credit them because we stand on their shoulders, not because we reproduce their words.