Creativity is all about what you do afterwards. I’m thinking about something that Miles Davis said about jazz improvisation: It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note–it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong. In improvisation, you don’t know what an action means until later. The group creates meaning,… Read More What You Do Afterwards
It was called Plato, and it was created in the 1960s and 1970s, at the University of Illinois. Even though it was used by tens of thousands of students, all over the U.S., most people have never heard of it. That’s why we need Brian Dear’s new book about Plato, called The Friendly Orange Glow.… Read More Plato: The First Educational Software
Billionaire James Dyson is the inventor of the famous vacuum cleaner, the equally famous air-purifying fan, and many other products. In today’s New York Times, he writes about his creative process–and it’s exactly the non-linear, iterative, hard-work process that creativity research has documented in every creative field. Here are his words of advice: His success… Read More Inventor James Dyson on the Creative Process
Emergence and complex systems: These concepts are more and more important, with the growth of the Internet, distributed intelligence, social media, and collective consciousness. “Emergence” refers to higher-level phenomena “emerging” from lower-level components, organized into complex systems. For example, mental states — like memory, attention, emotions — are said to emerge from neurons and their… Read More The Inventor of Emergence: George Henry Lewes, in 1875
New UNC Course for Spring 2018 Course title: The Maker Movement and Education Instructor: Professor Keith Sawyer Education research shows that people learn better when they move, they work with their hands, they manipulate objects, and they design and make things. We’ve known this for years, but it’s been very hard to design activities for… Read More The Maker Movement and Education
Where do successful entrepreneurs get their best creative ideas? Molly Reynolds* interviewed some entrepreneurs to find out. Here are my favorites : John Goodman, John Goodman PR: Takes a three-hour walk and that’s “when I have my best creative ideas. My head de-clutters, and I start thinking clearly.” Kat Quinzel, Cash Cow: “I get my best… Read More Where Entrepreneurs Have Ideas
Like all creativity, writing is a wandering and iterative process, where the creator doesn’t know where it’s going. A writer makes hundreds of creative decisions along the way–sometimes, a hundred in just one day. Which word to use; choosing a comma, period, or semicolon; moving a paragraph a few pages forward, or maybe up at… Read More Writers’ Drafts: Who Needs Them?
Jony Ive, the legendary designer of the iPhone, is now designing Apple’s new Cupertino headquarters, known as Apple Park. He worked closely with Steve Jobs before his passing, and now with CEO Tim Cook. As professional creatives, they know the importance of collaboration in creativity: Ive and Cook place great importance on employers being physically… Read More Creative Collaboration at Apple Park
Here’s a great new book by Agustin Fuentes, The Creative Spark. He starts with a pretty standard claim: that compared to all other animals, including our close primate relatives, creativity is what makes humans special. But what’s new here is that Fuentes says that it’s not just creativity–it’s creativity combined with social collaboration. I make a… Read More The Creative Spark
Brian Merchant’s new book, The One Device, has gotten a lot of media attention, including this review in the Wall Street Journal. It’s a compelling story–and an exhaustive one; maybe the book has too many details–but if you really really want to know everything about the iPhone, this is the book for you. In any book about… Read More The One Device: A New Book about the iPhone
The Creativity Guru 