ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses a problem-solving instrument based on solving Agents. In contrast to all other TRIZ heuristics, this is the first TRIZ method to have been developed almost independently in numerous countries — Russia, Israel, and then US. Agents in TRIZ originally were “small smart people” that could do anything a problem solver needed to do in the problem-to-solution transition. They were derived by Altshuller at the end of 1960s from Synectics, the American method of creativity activation. Ten years earlier, William Gordon, the author of Synectics, had suggested using personal analogy or empathy in the solving process [1]. The essence of empathy is that a person “enters” into the object to be improved and tries to imagine the action required by the problem. During TRIZ classes, Altshuller realized that

the weak point of empathy is the strong tendency to reject any action that is unacceptable to the human organism. This drawback is overcome with the help of “small smart people” in modeling [2]. A transition from the “small smart people” to “inanimate particles” was proposed by Solomon D. Tetel’baum about fifteen years ago [3], but the idea was not supported by other TRIZniks who often used teams of boys and girls during their lessons. Due to emigration of some TRIZniks from USSR to Israel in the 1980s, this methodology became popular in the Middle East. In the Israeli teaching experience, it was found that students did not always use small smart people effectively. It seems that subconsciously some students were reluctant to place these small smart people in situations that would be life threatening to humans, such as in strong acids or extreme fields. Therefore, Genady Filkovsky, Roni Horowirz, and Jacob Goldenberg from the Open University in Israel replaced small smart people with inanimate particles [4].* This particles method is now used actively in the Israeli derivative of TRIZ simplification named SIT, where it represents almost half of these problem-solving activities [4, 5]. However, some of the author’s students have argued that they can more easily imagine various actions performed by the “small smart people” than by inanimate particles. This is all a matter of semantics and the term itself is not as important as the method. But we will use the neutral term

agents

. The experience of Russian, Israeli, and American specialists is summarized and generalized in the Agents Method described in this chapter.