(…)There’s no such thing here, like in this world where everything now is instantaneous, the development is not instantaneous.
One has to work through it.
And the only way you work through it is not for the awards, you work through it for the pleasure of the work.
Tags: creativity, inspiration
John Cleese reflects on the practice of creativity at the Creativity World Forum. What does it mean to be creative? The destructiveness of interruption and the importance of creating your boundaries of time and space. And even episodes of Fawlty Towers and Monty Python sketches start out as blank sheets of paper.
The fact that understanding how good you are at something requires the same skills as being good at that same thing, which Cleese mentions in the end of his talk, is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. It makes the world go round.
Tags: Cleese, creativity
Things are coming together.
Recently I was considering a blog post titled “Wanna hold my balls?“, about juggler Michael Moschen. I had seen a fascinating Ted Video of Moschen giving a juggling demonstration rather than a performance. In this demonstration he goes into depth in the creative process behind his juggling performances. He shares some very interesting insights in how to explore and discover space, time, repetion, rythem, etc. The basic elements of juggling, as it turns out, are very closely related to the building blocks of animation.
Tags: Animation, creativity, Juggle, Magic, Moschen, Penn, Teller
Business is about getting from A to B, as efficiently as possible. But when B is unknown, ill defined or fuzzy, thats where creativity comes in. In his “what is Gamestorming?” presentation Dave Gray shoves a creative process in it’s entirity into a brainstorm, and calls it Gamestorming. Writing it down like this makes it sound a bit daft. But Gray very clearly explains what creativity is, what games are, and how these can work together in a Gamestorm. It absolutely makes sene. Enjoy.
Tags: creativity, design, Game, team
With a background in product design, I’ve always been an advocate of what lateley has become known as Design thinking. At the core of this design thinking is a creative, systematic and iterative approach to solving problems. This is the typical approach and mindset with which the creative professions – designers, architects, artists – tend tackle their creative challenges. But (finally) in recent years it has started to dawn on mankind that nearly all problems share similar underlying structures, which allows for a general approach: Design Thinking.
Currently on KickStarter, there is a fundraiser for a documentary on the subject: Design & Thinking. Have a look at the trailer, or even better, visit the Kickstarter site and chip in. I’m aiming for the T-shirt.
Tags: creativity, design, kickstarter
Last 3 years Eindhoven made the shortlist of the 7 Smartest Regions of the world. On June 3rd the Intelligent Community Forum elected Eindhoven THE Smartest Region in the World for 2011. Which is about the same as being the smartest region IN THE UNIVERSE!
Combine this knowledge with our recent 7th place in the Dutch Innovation Top 100, and you’ll understand we’re struggling to stay modest and humble… just kidding of course, we are very proud to be part of this community. It is a joy to work in an environment spring loaded with so much creative and innovative energy, and we’re grateful to be able to contribute to the advancement of technology, and mankind!
Related articles:
The Eindhoven Brainport
On Eindhoven.nl
Tags: creativity, Dutch, Eindhoven, Technology
War? yes war. When reading a lot about creativity and problem solving, two things keep raising their head: complexity and war. Rick Bookstaber has an interesting post on what aspects of complexity play a role in the current economic crisis, why game theory is not the best strategy to approach a problem like this, and why taking a military point of view is.
The Bookstaber post reminded me about this document from the US Army. Although it has a military background, it deals with problem solving and recognizing complexity in a very general way. What surprised me is, how very (very very) well the US army understands the creative process. A must read for anybody about to create something, but doesn’t exactly know what yet.
Update:
A post about on FastCompany illustrates the power and necessity of this design thinking. When redesigning a form for mortgage applications, Continuum soon realised that the problem wasn’t in the form it self, but rather in the mortgage application process behind the form. The graphic design problem turned out to be a service design problem. Their message to the world:
“This kind of re-framing, this habit of stepping back to see the human context of a problem, needs to become a regular habit (…) we’ll need to move beyond a use of design to handle aesthetic problems and tap into the power of design to solve for meaning.”
Tags: creativity, design
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has introduced six new banner formats that pave the way for more interactivity and rich content. It will be possible to make new cool and engaging banners that have more relevancy for the end-user. The six new ad units were chosen as part of an challenge out of 36 innovative submissions by more than twenty companies. To win the IAB set the following criteria:
The new banners deliver more rich media such as video, animations and high quality images. But some of them also integrate social media of even full screen viewing pleasure (almost a full webspecial).
All the wining formats are displayed in the videos below. You can also download specifications for each banner format:
(more…)
Tags: creativity, interactive banners, Interactive Products, marketing
Consider the following:
“Any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”
This idea is known as Conway’s Law, and finds its origin in software project management. However, it has proven to be applicable in nearly every situation where some kind of creation or design practice takes place.
We recently delivered the Alpha version of a moderately large project, a fully interactive online product configurator, with 3000+ assets. Overall, the project was a fairly smooth ride. And indeed, the structure of the project – and the also that of the final product – highly resembles our team’s (communication) structure. And what’s more, the few bumps we encountered in this project, were nearly all attributable to situations of poor communication. Combined with Conway’s Law, this teaches us the following lesson:
“Lack in communications leads to poor structure.”
To improve communications we introduced a daily meeting, with status updates, not unlike a daily Scrum (software development again, there must be something…). What’s best about this meeting? The name. Because since its introduction, the first thing on our daily agenda is: The Morning Prayer. Halelujah!
Tags: creativity, learning, methods, project management
Great comic from the Oatmeal about client-designer interaction. Hilarious, but it also touches in a very nice way on the Creativity-Engineering dualism. More on that in posts to come.
Oatmeal knows engineering from creativity...
Tags: creativity, design, The Oatmeal