Formulating a TRIZ contradiction

Do you face contradictions when trying to solve a problem? These contradictions can be administrative (e.g.: I'd like to [prevent the clothes peg from marking the linen], but I don't know how) or technical (for the clothespin, going in the direction of marking the linen less risks provoking the undesirable effect of seeing it less well held on the wire), or physical (still for the peg, the stiffness of the spring must be high to hold the linen and low not to mark it).

TRIZ is based on the premise that any inventive problem can be (re)formulated in the dialectical form of a contradiction. There are three forms of contradiction in TRIZ, but only two of them can be used to go further in solving inventive problems: technical and physical contradictions.

This worksheet suggests an approach for analyzing an initial situation in order to extract one or more contradictions and thus gain as many keys to solving the problem posed.

The benefits of formulating contradictions can be summed up in two points:

• a reformulation of your problem to simplify it and make it easier to solve;

• a model of your problem that allows you to combine knowledge from different sources, and thus take a multidisciplinary approach to solving it.