Creativity Archives
Turning irritants into beautiful ideas.
Since I taught myself PHP/MySQL last year, I've been thinking about how I'd like to teach kids to make stuff on the web. The idea has been sort of brewing in my head and I've written a few things/shared it with a few folks. Basically I want to create a curriculum not around teaching code, which is done and is boring, but around the interdisciplinary process of making stuff.
Anyway, the process would begin with teaching kids about where ideas come from. Basically I think that early on you can explain to children that rather than treating an irritant or inconvenience as something that annoys them, you can show them it's an opportunity to make something new: To fix a problem. That to me describes the entrepreneurial spirit. There, I Fixed It is more than just the ability to continue on with what you were doing, it is invention. (I'm certainly not the first person to make this point, Thoughtless Acts illustrates it nicely.)
Or, take this definition from the very long Atlantic article on happiness. (It's about the longest running longitudinal studies that has looked at the overall health and well-being of a select group of Harvard males over the last 70 years.) The quote is about one of the studies participants who had overcome lots of hardships:
In several vignettes in the book, Vaillant presents Merton [a participant] as an exemplar of how mature adaptations are a real-life alchemy, a way of turning the dross of emotional crises, pain, and deprivation into the gold of human connection, accomplishment, and creativity. "Such mechanisms are analogous to the involuntary grace by which an oyster, coping with an irritating grain of sand, creates a pearl," he writes. 'Humans, too, when confronted with irritants, engage in unconscious but often creative behavior."
It makes me smile to think of human ingenuity as comparable to an oyster making a pearl. And I think it's a pretty good recipe.
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Some questions from the head of a non-marketer for a change.
I am a long-time reader of noahbrier.com, first-time poster. I am not a marketing person, though I do keep up with this blog and the insightful discussions on it, and so struggled a little with what I could write on this blog that would be in keeping with its spirit.
So instead of a tutorial on how to split a check in NYC or a rant about the un-discussed dangers to the American republic, I would like, with the indulgence of the readership, to posit a few questions of balance.
When is it good and right to ignore the feedback and the wishes of your Consumer?
I followed the unveiling of the current generation of video game consoles quite closely. Every time a new feature of the Wii (which at that point was called the Nintendo Revolution) was revealed, be it the motion sensing or the cost-reducing-but-graphically-unimpressive CPU or the name change, video game websites exploded with negative comments. Bloggers excoriated Nintendo, petitions were started, and it was declared Nintendo would soon be out of the hardware business; the community by and large decried Nintendo for ignoring the consumer.
Snakes on a Plane was very receptive to the suggestions it received from what studio executives must have assumed was a large cult following. It was largely a movie by internet committee.
The Wii is selling as fast as Nintendo can produce units; SoaP was a fun meme (for a while) but somewhat of a financial disappointment.
One letter to a company is supposed to equal the opinion of several dozen people. I doubt internet communications (e.g. email, blogs, forums), with their immediacy and effortlessness, carry that same weight. Everyone may have a voice on the internet, but with the lack of physical presence and anonymity, it is easy for one very vocal and dedicated person to look like 50. And there are bad ideas out there. Somebody liked New Coke.
When should a company decide that they know what their consumer wants better that the consumer themselves?
How do you reconcile specialization with cross-discipline applications or analogs in learning (in a way that is not shallow)?
I am a huge fan of applying approaches, ideas, and theories from one discipline to another. I am delighted when connections are made between seemingly disparate fields. However, I feel I often run into ideas from science and math that are taken out of context, applied incorrectly, or used to draw fallacious conclusions. Science and math are subjects I am familiar with; I don’t doubt it is similar with other fields.
It is very easy to misunderstand an idea based on a shallow treatment. A condensed-AP-article version of a theory, idea, or approach to a problem is asking for misappropriation (on a side note I have found that shallow articles are my frustration as of late with Wired). Then there is the difference between understanding an idea and being able to apply it. Only with application are you going to knock down some bodies.
Is the answer for someone with a wide knowledge base to “manage� people with rich, specialized knowledge bases? Or is it to grab someone versed in a particular field whenever you run into an obstacle? Outsourcing a new idea seems like a recipe for miscommunication, for a beast you did not intend to create, but then maybe something good comes of that as well.
I see many wonderful musings concerning disciplinary cross-pollination. Are these ideas only useful as metaphors and similes? If not, how do we get these ideas out of the ether?
How do you make sure you are not promoting revolution for revolution’s sake?
I suppose a reformulation of this question would be, “How do you make sure that you are not trying to restructure your industry based on a fad?� There is something romantic and exciting about a call for drastic change, but does a company need to, or even should it, adapt to the latest whim of the internet? It’s hard to be nimble with a legal department.
When I entered undergrad our rather prestigious architecture school had just lost many of the original thinkers who made it so prestigious. The remaining professors were left trying to replicate the magic. A friend told me of one day in class, when a professor looked at a student’s model and scolded, “Be avant-garde!� Ponder how ridiculous that is for a minute, to have this oxymoronic cannon. I am always reminded of this story when I hear about a company planning a viral campaign.
I like openness, but do we really want to see how the sausage is made?
Really?
Though I did pontificate and was vague, I meant these as actual questions, and I would love to hear this community’s thoughts.
I will work on brevity and re-read my Strunk and White. Also, you may have noticed that I am the only guest poster without a web sight, so in closing, ERIK DIES, ERIK DIES, ERIK DIES, ERIK DIES, ERIK DIES. There. Now when I google my name maybe something other that an obituary will pop up…
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I need to create 10 pieces of art by 12am or I turn into a pumpkin.
My friend Brian came up with the idea for the Midnight Art Series about a month ago. I'm not entirely sure what brought it on, but he asked me if I'd be a part of it. Essentially ten people get together at midnight on a Friday night (last evening) and are given a prompt and color palette. From there they need to create ten pieces which will be exhibited and then distributed, one each, to the other participants.
For the inaugural go of this the prompt is:
Grace Under Fire
And the color palette is:
Purple and Silver
I thought it might be fun to update this during the day with photos and thoughts I have. You can follow all the action at Flickr.
And if anyone has any brilliant thoughts, feel free to leave them in the comments. I've got an idea at the moment, but I'm by no means stuck to it.
Update (3:25pm): So I think I have a basic idea at this point. I have taken a bunch of small print from cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, etc. and laid it out on a single page. I have purple paper to print on and silver paper to lay it on top of. I am going to try and cut grace right into it.
Update (4:00pm): One down, nine to go . . .
Update (7:18pm): One more to go . . . . I'm quite tired of cutting things. Sorry for the crappy quality, took it on my BlackBerry.
Update (7:41): All done. Finally. Ten down.
Update (4/1/07): All done and have had about a day to reflect. Beyond being quite exhausted at this point it was a fabulous experience and idea. I found myself doing something so far from my regular routine that it was freeing. Seeing all the work yesterday evening was absolutely amazing. Ten people took the same prompt and went in incredibly different directions: Bicycles, eggs, icebergs, typography, photography, illustration . . . It was amazing. As soon as we get a site up with the scans I will make sure to post a link.
Thanks for following along, hope you enjoyed.
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Some thoughts about the role of hustling in art.
Back in October I was at SFMOMA and saw Duchamp's Fountain. I had seen it before, but was especially struck by the card that went along with the piece. It read: "Fountain was what Duchamp called a readymade, an object elevated to the status of art not because he had created it, but because he had chosen it."
It's exactly the kind of thing people look at and say, "I could have painted that" and then break into a speech about how it's not really art? That bugs me. More and more lately I've been of the belief that art is in large part the very act of declaring it so.
Hear me out: Duchamp's Fountain is admittedly an everyday object that he raised to elite status. But part of what makes it deserving of being housed in an exhibit like the one at SFMOMA is that Duchamp had the balls to call it art. He navigated the system and got it into a museum, there's certainly beauty in that kind of hustle.
Now think about some of the great modernist painters? They brought new styles and ideas to the forefront. They challenged conventional wisdom. In many ways they are the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit. What we now take for granted as 'art' was once anything but.
I've been watching a documentary series of Christo and Jeanne-Claude for whatever you might say about their work, the fact that they make it happen is really quite magical. How many people would even know where to start the process of placing hundreds of gates in Central Park?
In one of the videos Christo alludes to this fact, explaining to a community board who was voting on whether to allow him to run a fence through a California town that they were all a part of his giant art project whether they agreed with it or not.
I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with all this, but I think the bottom line for me is that the act of creation deserves more credit than it gets. Lots of people have ideas and lots of others are supremely talented, but most people don't bring them together and make something real. If I could get a picture of my big toe somehow placed in the Met then whose to say it's not art?
What's more, it's further proof that anything is possible. Art and everything else are up for interpretation. I think I've written it before, but at some point the wheel didn't exist and someone discovered it. Maybe 100 people realized it before, but it was that one caveman who realized it's power that got all the credit.
That's why we've got to make things happen.
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Thinking about just what inspiration means and how to become more inspirable.
For a while now Piers has been asking people what inspires them. We were talking about it today and I had a few thoughts that felt worth sharing.
I can't answer the inspiration question well because I'm inspired by almost everything. I read as much as I can and try to always keep my eyes and ears open. I spend every day trying to consume as much as possible with the sole purpose of filing in away for a rainy day. The other day I went to SFMOMA and was inspired by the card that went along with the Duchamp fountain. Today in a brainstorm I was inspired by the Powers of Ten video and this afternoon during a conversation I was inspired by a recent post by Scott Berkun titled "Why Innovation Efforts Fail". For those keeping score, that's one piece of art, one video and one blog entry.
Ultimately my belief is that anything can be inspiring. thoughtless acts is a book on intuitive design. It includes pictures of things like people tying a tea bag around the handle of a cup to keep it from falling in or a woman sticking a pencil in her hair. The message is that people are finding innovative solutions to problems all the time and, as a designer, all you need to do is open your eyes to be inspired by them.
So when I think about inspiration, I think about understanding that anything can be inspiration. Most of us grow up believing that learning must be boring. A teacher must stand in front of the class and teach at us or history must come through some incredibly dry textbook. That's not true, though. We get so much more out of those times when we're engaged in an activity. Look at the detective work people put into spoiling Survivor or the research they do to prepare for a fantasy football draft. By being engaged we are more inspirable.
I've mentioned it a ton of times around here, but I believe the most important lesson of the internet is as a metaphor for our brains. Both are networks. My take on inspiration is to try and feed my brain as much information as possible and then figure out how it connects when the time comes. Often the biggest innovations come from connecting the most seemingly distant ideas. In the end, though, the best I can do to work towards that is keep my senses open to all possibilities.
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Real innovation may just be on the other side of that "idea block" you're suffering.
For anyone who has ever been involved in a brainstorm, or just been trying to figure out a problem, you know about how there's always that low point. It's normally the time when everyone has come up with a bunch of good ideas and it doesn't seem like there are many other interesting places to go. Often brainstorms even end at this point. However, as I learned while having a drink with a friend of mine currently getting his MBA, if you push through that valley of ideas you will see another, even more fruitful peak. That's when the really great ideas come out. The innovative ideas.
Let me illustrate for you:
Essentially what you get in that first curve is some good ideas. Sometimes they can even be great. But if you push through the low point, you have a chance to come up with even more innovative approaches to solving the problem at hand.
As someone who is quite fond of brainstorming, I'm always looking for new tips and techniques to help make ideation more fruitful. The "m curve" seems like something you can take far beyond a brainstorm, however. There's a larger lesson here about the benefits of sticking with something. Funny enough, just today I was reading an article about the importance of grit in someone's success. The article points to a recent University of Pennsylvania study, which found "that the gritty are more likely to achieve success in school, work and other pursuits -- perhaps because their passion and commitment help them endure the inevitable setbacks that occur in any long-term undertaking."
In an effort not to sound like some kind of self-help preacher, I'm going to cut myself off here. You always hear that innovative ideas come at the most unexpected times, but maybe if we just fought a little harder through our "idea block" we'd find innovation more easily.
Just as a last note, I found very little (other than this blog entry) on the "m curve" in a very limited Google search. If anyone finds any more information on it, I'd be greatly appreciative.
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It's important to always have someone leading a brainstorm who follows a different set of rules and guidelines from everyone else.
In the comments of Bringing Brainstorming to the Boardroom, Ben brings up an interesting point that I failed to mention:
This was all very interesting. I've been thinking about brainstorming in groups a lot lately, as this is frequently the type of thing you're expected to do in law school. Its been my experience lately that when you put a bunch of bright, creative people together in a room, there is a tendency for everyone to go around saying their ideas, not really building on or developing any of them. I don't think people are purposefully closed-minded, I think its just a natural reaction to want to flesh out your own idea before considering another person's.
One of the things that has kept our brainstorming going is having a group leader who kind of moderates everything and steers the discussion towards collaboration. But I think having a leader is probably just one way to confront the problem. I bet if you have a group of people who do a lot of brainstorming--say at a marketing company for example--after a while you probably can dispense with a leader because everyone is familiar with the process.
I wish Ben was right about the ability to dispense with the leader in a marketing setting, but it's just not the case. It is incredibly important to always have a leader in a brainstorm, otherwise, just what Ben mentioned tends to happen. Even worse at an agency you run the risk of a brainstorm turning into a tactical discussion without the help of a leader. The rules I mentioned for a great brainstorm were aimed at brainstormees, not the leader, who must assume a much different role.
The leader of the brainstorm should not actually be a participating member, instead their job is to guide the discussion, keep people on path, make sure people are following the rules and write everything down. It's sometimes hard to let go of control as the leader of a brainstorm, but it's important to accept that position going in; as the leader it's not your job to contribute ideas and you need to deal with it.
Once the brainstorm has ended the leader takes those ideas that the group has come up with and starts to evaluate them and shape them. By writing the ideas down in a more coherent format, holes start to show up and next steps and needs emerge.
So for Ben, and anyone else who's brainstorming, next time you get a bunch of smart people in the room, make sure there's someone leading the discussion, things should work much better that way.
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What brings some people's creativity to the surface?
Creativity is one of my favorite topics. I'm fascinated by what makes one person considered creative and another not. I believe that everyone has the inherent abilities to be creative, so what gives some of us the potential and others not? I think Steve Jobs
is on to something when he says, "Creativity is just connecting things." However, connecting things is not really something you can just throw around as easy. I mean, everyone can "connect things" in one way or another, and Jobs caveats his statement by talking about connecting diverse experiences, which gets us a bit closer to just what's going on. But the question remains, if everyone can "connect things" and everyone has "diverse experiences" in one way or another, why are only some people considered creative?
I think there are two major steps that stand in between experiences and connecting that explain creativity. The first I'll call digestion. A creative individual doesn't take things at face value, they examine and dig, trying to find meaning, sometimes for a mass audience and sometimes just for their own good. Bruce DeBoer explains it like this in "What makes me creative?" (via Lifehack.org):
Information and experience are like food for the creative process. It's raw substance. Information needs to be digested to brain-fat so it can re-immerge as mature creative energy. It's as if it needs to be inculcated into our souls before we are free to randomize it into original creative expression. If we don't digest it, a creative product – art, innovation, music, etc. – is sure to be more derivative that original. Creativity is using our unique inner selves to rearrange the raw material.
So if diverse experiences are the food, the creative individual digests it by attaching meaning. For those geeks out there, you can think of this as the metadata of the experiences. This allows the creative individual to come back later and search for that raw material using terms and ideas that are easily understandable. Another way to think of this would be as translating the experience into the language of creativity.
Following the digestion/metadata/translation I believe some grouping happens. This is is a lower level process than the "connecting" that ultimately makes someone creative. It's about finding some basic buckets to throw your digesting experience into. In a way this step could be included as part of the basic metadata, and maybe should exist as a step before, but since I'm writing this by the seat of my pants, it exists as step three for now. A simple example of this would be your state of mind as you experience something. For instance, as I sat outside reading Emergence today, I was thinking in the bucket of creativity. In fact, the further I write this, the more I think this basic grouping process is more of a second step than a third, since it really is about the state of mind your in as you have your experience. (Anyway, you get the idea.)
Finally, after you've bucketed and attached your metadata it's time to start connecting. Like I said, anyone can connect, but if you haven't done the previous work, your connections will be less fruitful. Think of it as background research: the more you know before you begin, the more fruitful and efficient you can be when you actually get to working on your project. Now that everything is arranged and prepared, you can easily see where they connect to both each other and to new experiences. Connections seem obvious to a creative person because of this preparation they've done. They're ready to connect everything together.
Which leads me to the final piece of the creativity puzzle: adaptability. I don't think this is necessarily a step in the process as much as it is an overall state. Creative people can adapt to changing environments, in fact, many enjoy this adaptation. They enjoy immersing themselves in topics and ideas that are out of their regular comfort area because they realize they can adapt. When you think about, things outside your regular comfort area are probably only a few connections away anyway. So when you're open to these new ideas and thinking critically about how they may connect to your old ideas and experiences, your creativity can flourish. Adaptability allows people to follow courses that may not seem to obviously connect with the belief that they will eventually find where the two roads merge. Without this constant openness/adaptability, the process I've laid out can't succeed.
As expected, it all works together.
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Hi, I'm 