Clearly once you understand what is wanted, you need to know what will satisfy those wants.  One needs to translate the wants, perhaps stated as requirements into the specific tasks that skilled crafts persons will do in order to create that which is intended to satisfy the wants.  Finding a solution or knowing what to do is the job of the designer, the architect, the manager, the director, the choreographer, etc.  This seems so fundamental and obvious that my simulations had better identify it as critical.  However, if you read the current literature on project management methodology the need for this is missing from the methodologies.  It is as if by magic you will know what to do and you do not need to develop the skill.  All you need to do is following the methodology recipe.  I elaborate why this does NOT work in The Methodology Emperor Has No Clothes. 

The simulations do not tell us how the architect does her job.  Nor can we reasonably expect this.  If the simulations could do this then the simulations might very well be smart enough to be the architect.  Try to analyze precisely what a person does, or you yourself do, when designing a solution to satisfy some expressed wants.  Sometimes it is very simple.  Suppose I see a distressed person in the middle of the desert who says, "I want a drink." It does not take any advanced design or problem solving capability to come up with a glass of water as the solution.  Yet there are times when I have come up with a design of a complex technological product or a theatrical set where someone asked me, “How did you think of that?” In a very real sense, I don't know.  The solution was just there.  If you do not immediately see this point then I suggest you read Julian Jaynes' book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  If we really did understand how we do such feats, then we really could build an intelligent being (other than through the biological process).  At the present we cannot.  I will propose a theory about how this is done and why it is not visible to our conscious mind in the Section on Mimetics.

Even though I do not believe we fully understand the mechanism, I do believe we have a pretty good idea of how one prepares to meet the creative design challenge; 1) study diligently and 2) develop the natural (we all have it) creative ability that is one of the fundamental and defining characteristics of Homo sapiens.  Let's discuss both.

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