Don’t Play It Like the Flute An Article by Matthias Ott matthiasott.com Don’t play it like the flute. Play it as if it was the wind whistling through the desert dunes. No matter what you love to create, there is something to be learned from the way Hans Zimmer approached the Dune score. We are all striving to create work that is novel, innovative, memorable, and inspiring. To get there, however, we tend to focus on getting things right, on avoiding mistakes, on “being professional”. Yes, it is important to have the commitment, dedication, and attention to detail of a professional. But being right? That will only take you so far. What is much more important is to approach the problem in front of you with curiosity and an open mind. With an urge to explore what can be found beyond the ordinary, beyond the right way of doing things. If you want to create something that nobody has come up with yet, it is important that you try out all the crazy ideas others are afraid to try, that you build prototypes, improvise, and freely play with the materials and the technologies you have at hand. musiccreativitynoveltyexplorationcuriosity
Painting With the Web An Article by Matthias Ott matthiasott.com So much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process. A constant dialogueConstant reflection and refinement How do you know when your paintings are finished?Designing with code artwwwcreativityprocesscode
Deep Interlock Forms which have a high degree of life tend to contain some type of interlock – a “hooking into” their surroundings – or an ambiguity between element and context, either case creating a zone belonging to both the form and to its surroundings, making it difficult to disentangle the two. The interlock, or ambiguity, strengthens the centers on either side, which are intensified by the new center formed between the two. Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order The versatility of flat surfacesStrength from both mass and form168. Connection to the EarthInterlockingProtected, yet tuned in naturearchitecture