I, Pencil – lovely little film about how everything is connected. Because, as Charles Eames famously noted, “Eventually everything connects — people, ideas, objects… the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.”
creativity and innovation
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In the long run, the media bias against incremental progress may be more damaging than any bias the media display toward the political left or right. The media are heavily biased toward extreme events, and they are slightly biased toward negative events — though in their defense, that bias may just be a reflection of the human brain’s propensity to focus more on negative information than positive, a trait extensively documented by neuroscience and psychology studies.
Steven Johnson on the value of incremental progress. Johnson’s latest book, Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age, is an absolute must-read.
As Sir Francis Bacon put it in his essays centuries ago,“It were good, therefore, that men in their innovations would follow the example of time itself; which indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly, by degrees scarce to be perceived.”
Freestylers enter a “flow” state, which researchers described as a “complete immersion in creative activity, typified by focused self-motivation, positive emotional valence and loss of self-consciousness.” Their creative gate is wide open.
“It’s the absence of attention,” said [researchers]. “When the attention system is partially offline, you can just let things fly and let things come without critiquing, monitoring or judging them.” “It’s almost like you’re able to think faster. … You’re able to incorporate multiple perspectives without thinking about it.”
Neuroscientists study freestyle rap to better understand how creativity works, with findings echoing the principles of this 1939 “technique for producing ideas”
You can be Cautious or you can be Creative (but there’s no such thing as a Cautious Creative).
George Lois. More wisdom on creativity from the legendary ad man and art director here.
When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love.
Ernest Hemingway on the pace and routine of writing
Once you see this pattern—a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know—you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt. It’s been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.
[…]
The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.
Those earlier inventions systems started out markedly inferior to the high-cost alternative: records were scratchy, PCs were crashy. But first they got better, then they got better than that, and finally, they got so good, for so cheap, that they changed people’s sense of what was possible.
In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs.
If you read one thing this week, make it the always-brilliant Clay Shirky on what the collapse of the music industry teaches us about the future of higher education.
How Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road, part of designer Johnson Banks’ fantastic poster titled The Power of Creativity
Remember David Friedman’s video portraits of inventors? He has now taken them to PBS in a new series, appropriately titled Inventors. The debut episode tells the story of mechanical engineer Donald Scruggs, who counts among his patents a screw-in coffin buried vertically to make better use of space — a fine addition to these unorthodox design ideas for death.
An ode to creative work from Behance, a film by m ss ng p eces.
Maybe people used to think Power-Point and various other things were just tools, like a hammer. But no, every tool, including hammers, is about doing very specific things. With a hammer, it’s easier to hit a certain kind of nail than it is other kinds of thing. And so they lead you, subtly, to do certain kinds of things. At the end of the 1800s, Edison invented a recording system that didn’t use any electronics. There was no microphone: the sound was focused through a physical horn that made a little needle etch a wax cylinder. The technology could record certain things, such as a singer, but percussive things, such as a bass drum, those kind of big bass-sound impulses, made the needle jump in the recording and the playback, so a lot of the time they relegated the bass to the back of the [recording] venue, or sometimes took it out altogether in jazz recordings. Which meant that the jazz ensembles that were recorded were not the same instrumentation as you would hear live. And so what got disseminated, what people heard and recognised as jazz, early jazz, bore almost no resemblance to what was actually being played. The technology limited what could actually be distributed. That’s an early and blatant example, but it continues. It’s a little more subtle. There are other things now that shape the music in other, more subtle ways.
David Byrne on how technology affects music and the way we listen. For a deeper look at the intersection of technology and creativity, see his fantastic How Music Works.
Technoillusionist Marco Tempest uses electric magic to tell the story of Nikola Tesla and electricity.
There are a lot of people in the corporate world who need to be convinced that open source is a good thing. We won’t change their minds with overthrow. We will change their minds by competing fairly on their playing field, sometimes by their rules, and offering better products and services. We won’t always meet our ideals with every product or service.
Art makes questions, and leadership… is asking a lot of questions.
John Maeda on how art, technology, and design empower creative leaders. His latest book, Redesigning Leadership (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life), is a must-read.
