There’s the book I was looking for… I looked at this briefly at the library one day, found it intriguing but didn’t really pay a lot of attention to it, then yesterday found myself ‘discovering’ the basic idea of the book again. But having since forgotten the title, and the library having moved the whole section to another place so I couldn’t use place-memory to find it, and failing to find it in the area where I think it should have been moved to, but remembering the general sort of books I was looking for when I did happen upon it, and using the LOC catalog browse-by-call-number feature, I finally found it again: Bypasses.
The basic idea behind the book is that a major problem solving technique that appears in various guises is to transform the problem from one domain to another, solve the transformed problem, then transform the solution back to the original domain. In a pseudo-mathematical manner of speaking: T-1MT. The author gathered examples from different fields and made some arguments about the generalization. Don’t remember a lot about it, but I’m going to find a copy again and read a bit more…