Pull the thread that connects the long history of human ingenuity and you'll find that some of the biggest leaps forward in human inventiveness happen when ideas from one field or region are applied to another to produce a different, not merely better, way to solve a problem. I call this concept "outsider insight" and it's at the heart of many major breakthroughs from algebra to the printing press to biochemistry to today.

The archive of interestingness is my attempt to create a tool to augment our own creativity and problem-solving by putting this idea to the test. The tool offers us three unrelated, but interesting, concepts and an invitation to make our own connections. If the combination isn't working to spark ideas, try remixing until you find one that does.

You can scramble the mix one element at a time, or hit the "stochastic parataxis" button to remix all three concepts. This tool is offered freely with the hopes that it might inspire, incite or provoke your own inventiveness.