Amidst the hysteria for constant connectivity, transparency and 'efficient' creativity which belies the current crisis of creativity, this paper asserts the value of poetic incommunicability—to creativity and to society. The role of the poet-artist-designer is vital in constructing structures of multivocality which activate the dynamic relations between communicability and incommunicability. The paradoxically ‘efficient’ mechanisms of these structures can be understood through theories of poetry depicted by Viktor Shklovsky and André Breton.

The 'black box', a figure of incommunicability borrowed from science, represents the possibility of temporary disconnection, a critical precondition of creativity. Conceptualizing and valuing such spaces while designing the interruptibility of their reciprocal relations with communicability—the architecture of their porosity—becomes the primary task of 'dialogical design'.

These themes are explored, conveyed, delayed and complicated through the device of the metalogue, which collages and connects, often in a more physical narrative sense.

incommunicability; multivocality; creativity; dialogical design; black boxes; opacity