According to its inventor Fritz Zwicky, this creativity technique is intended to enable a “total solution” to a given problem. The technique first breaks down a problem or challenge into individual parts, which are then combined and reassembled in a variety of ways. The name morphological box is somewhat misleading; a kind of morphological tableau or table is used.
The term can be interpreted according to general opinion (among others cited after Schlicksupp) and derived from the Greek as:
– Shape, form and structure theory
– order established according to certain criteria
– interdisciplinary methodology
– integral, comparative approach
Generation of a variety of ideas, especially for product improvements, updates and product reformulations via the systematic decomposition of complex issues into definable individual elements (problem parameters), design variation of the individual elements and combination of design variations into new overall solutions.
Required Experience: Thorough expertise in the area of responsibility covered is required. In order to fully exploit the possibilities of the method, in-depth application experience is highly recommended. Modest morphologies, however, can always succeed even in first attempts.
Since especially finding the parameters from experience is perceived as the most difficult step, some more
Tips:
– The parameters must be logically independent of each other so that the free combinability is given.
– The parameters must be able to apply to all conceivable solutions and not only be valid for a subset of the problem.
– The parameters should have conceptual relevance and describe not insignificant details of the searched solution.
The creation time can be very long when creating complex morphologies and can take several days or even weeks.
The goal of the morphological box is to develop new approaches to problem solving.
For this purpose, a problem is split into subproblems, subfunctions or sequence steps (parameters), which are noted among each other. Care must be taken to ensure that the individual parameters are independent of each other and can be operationalized. In each case, expressions of this characteristic are then noted next to the individual parameters. In this way, a matrix is created in which all combinations of parameters and possible characteristics are recorded. By looking at different combinations of characteristics of individual parameters, new ideas for the design of problem solutions can be found. In order to be able to create and use the morphological box to its full extent, the problem must first be analyzed in detail and broken down into its subproblems or components. The subsamples must be modular and independent of each other.
The advantage of this method is that it is particularly well suited for dealing with complex constellation problems, where an overall solution results from the combination of different individual solutions.
Building a suitable morphological box requires the user to have a sound technical knowledge of the problem area in question, without which he will quickly fail in most cases.