Old wine in new bottles

Have you ever seen the furniture only made of wood, without a nail? Several years ago, a friend of mine, studying architecture, introduced the amazing craft called mortise-and-tenon joint to me and told me that it had been used for thousands of years by woodworkers around the world. In traditional Chinese architecture, wood components, such as beams, roof frames and brackets, were made to interlock with perfect fit, without using fasteners or glues, enabling the wood to expand and contract according to humidity. Although he spoke like an encyclopedia about it, I could not get a clear picture of what it was like.

Few days ago, I came across an app called “wood joints”, which a friend of mine shared on Wechat. After downloading it, I was amazed to find that this app provides a high quality 3D model (the mortise-and-tenon joint in books are two dimensional drawings) to view the 27 classical mortise-and-tenon joint structures broken down into their composite parts.

The first thought that occurred to me was that creativity comes from our “big questions” which lead us toward our purpose. The big question of the designer of the app started with the influence of his father who used to make the furniture by himself. He started to ask himself, “How can I use computer technology to gain a clear perspective of the classical mortise-and-tenon joint structures?” After 6 months of preparation and hard work, his team accomplished the dream.

Actually, the app is a good example of the long tail effect. According to statistics, the number of downloads of the app exceeded 160,000 after 20 days of its release. The mortise-and-tenon technique is able to attract wide interest using social networking service though it’s only a hard-to-find item in a niche market, as in the case of many traditional crafts.

However, the biggest problem is that “wood joints” lacks a clear business strategy, which made it sustain losses continuously in business. Currently, the app is nothing but a reader providing the historical and professional knowledge for those who are interested in architecture and design. Without any profit, it’s hard to keep on improving it and make big progress.

It is a fallacy to say that creativity is to think about totally new things. In this case, it shows that creativity can be closely related to our tradition. The ideas of “tradition” and “creativity” seem at first glance to be opposed and incompatible. However, the two are not only compatible but mutually supportive.