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
The Evolution and Fate of Botanical Field Books An Essay from Field Notes on Science and Nature by James L. Reveal To serve as a reminderSterile creaturesFurther and further away
To serve as a reminder Looking back at my notebooks now, the information seems fairly sketchy, often abbreviated, and fairly uninformative. The purpose was merely to serve as a reminder for when, that evening, I would write up my notes in a proper field book. Mental infrastructure memory
Sterile creatures Now that we are in the era of personal computers, traditional field books are being replaced by computer files. By default such “field books” are sterile creatures—all the words are spelled properly, the location data are exact to a matter of a few feet, and everything is properly formatted. In the spring of 1998, I penciled my last entry into my signature field book with the bright orange cover. Thereafter I have maintained a computer-based field book. Oh, all the right stuff is there, clear, crisp and, well, dull… I tend to be overly particular about it—the format has to be right, everything properly spelled, the descriptive sequence in the proper order, and even the observations drafted with the final publication in mind (rather than what I happen to see at the moment). The emotions of finding something new, once mentioned in my handwritten field books, are now missing, as if my mental editor says “no, that is not proper for a scientific journal.” notetaking
Further and further away In looking over my own forty-five years of keeping a record of plant specimens, I find that I am personally moving further and further away from the words I generate, becoming more aloof and separate from the experience of the actual event of collecting, concentrating instead on the precision of where and when. It is merely record keeping for the sole purpose of giving the facts. With the decline of letter writing and the sterilization of field books, what we are losing is the individual. Field books are like letters that are replaced by often ephemeral emails. I fear that as we move further into the computer age we will similarly lose the detailed historical record that field books once provided. Sadly, the personalities of botanists will also be lost, for such musings as might be found in a field book are often telling to those wishing to know more of the past.