1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
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  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
  17. art 86
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  32. Botton, Alain de 38
  33. Brand, Stewart 4
  34. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  35. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
  36. Broskoski, Charles 6
  37. brutalism 7
  38. building 16
  39. bureaucracy 12
  40. Burnham, Bo 9
  41. business 15
  42. Byron, Lord 14
  43. Cagan, Marty 8
  44. Calvino, Italo 21
  45. Camus, Albert 13
  46. care 6
  47. Carruth, Shane 15
  48. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  49. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  50. chance 11
  51. change 16
  52. Chiang, Ted 4
  53. childhood 6
  54. Chimero, Frank 17
  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
  57. Clark, Robin 3
  58. Cleary, Thomas 8
  59. Cleary, J.C. 8
  60. code 20
  61. collaboration 18
  62. collections 31
  63. color 23
  64. commonplace 11
  65. communication 31
  66. community 7
  67. complexity 11
  68. connection 24
  69. constraints 25
  70. construction 9
  71. content 9
  72. Corbusier, Le 13
  73. Coyier, Chris 4
  74. craft 66
  75. creativity 59
  76. crime 9
  77. Critchlow, Tom 5
  78. critique 10
  79. Cross, Nigel 12
  80. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  81. css 11
  82. culture 13
  83. curiosity 11
  84. cycles 7
  85. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  86. darkness 28
  87. Darwin, Will 10
  88. data 8
  89. death 38
  90. Debord, Guy 6
  91. decisions 10
  92. design 131
  93. details 31
  94. Dickinson, Emily 9
  95. Dieste, Eladio 4
  96. discovery 9
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  98. Dorn, Brandon 11
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  100. Drucker, Peter F. 15
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  102. Eatock, Daniel 4
  103. economics 13
  104. efficiency 7
  105. Eisenman, Peter 8
  106. Eliot, T.S. 14
  107. emotion 8
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  110. Eno, Brian 4
  111. ethics 14
  112. euphony 38
  113. Evans, Benedict 4
  114. evolution 9
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  116. farming 8
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  119. feedback 6
  120. flaws 10
  121. Flexner, Abraham 8
  122. food 16
  123. form 19
  124. Fowler, Martin 4
  125. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  126. friendship 6
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  132. Garfunkel, Art 6
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  135. goals 9
  136. Gombrich, E. H. 4
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  138. Graham, Paul 37
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  141. Hamming, Richard 45
  142. happiness 17
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  144. Harper, Thomas J. 15
  145. Hayes, Brian 28
  146. heat 7
  147. Heinrich, Bernd 7
  148. Herbert, Frank 4
  149. Heschong, Lisa 27
  150. Hesse, Herman 6
  151. history 13
  152. Hoffman, Yoel 10
  153. Hofstadter, Douglas 6
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  156. Hoyt, Ben 5
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  159. humanity 16
  160. humor 6
  161. Huxley, Aldous 7
  162. hypermedia 22
  163. i 18
  164. ideas 21
  165. identity 33
  166. images 10
  167. industry 9
  168. information 42
  169. infrastructure 17
  170. innovation 15
  171. interaction 10
  172. interest 10
  173. interfaces 37
  174. intuition 8
  175. invention 10
  176. Irwin, Robert 65
  177. Isaacson, Walter 28
  178. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  179. iteration 13
  180. Ive, Jonathan 6
  181. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  182. Jacobs, Jane 54
  183. Jacobs, Alan 5
  184. Jobs, Steve 20
  185. Jones, Nick 5
  186. Kahn, Louis 4
  187. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  188. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  189. Keith, Jeremy 6
  190. Keller, Jenny 10
  191. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  192. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
  193. Kingdon, Jonathan 5
  194. Kitching, Roger 7
  195. Klein, Laura 4
  196. Kleon, Austin 13
  197. Klinkenborg, Verlyn 24
  198. Klyn, Dan 20
  199. knowledge 29
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  201. Kramer, Karen L. 10
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  203. Kuma, Kengo 18
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  207. light 31
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  211. Lupton, Ellen 11
  212. Luu, Dan 8
  213. Lynch, Kevin 12
  214. MacIver, David R. 8
  215. MacWright, Tom 5
  216. Magnus, Margaret 12
  217. making 77
  218. management 14
  219. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  220. Markson, David 16
  221. Mars, Roman 13
  222. material 39
  223. math 16
  224. McCarter, Robert 21
  225. meaning 33
  226. media 16
  227. melancholy 52
  228. memory 29
  229. metaphor 10
  230. metrics 19
  231. microsites 49
  232. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  233. Mills, C. Wright 9
  234. minimalism 10
  235. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  236. Mod, Craig 15
  237. modularity 6
  238. Mollison, Bill 31
  239. morality 8
  240. Murakami, Haruki 21
  241. music 16
  242. Müller, Boris 7
  243. Naka, Toshiharu 8
  244. names 11
  245. Naskrecki, Piotr 5
  246. nature 51
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  248. Neustadter, Scott 3
  249. Noessel, Christopher 7
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  256. Ott, Matthias 4
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Creativity

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  • We should not confuse order and tidiness

    To the observer, this may seem like a very unordered and untidy system; however, we should not confuse order and tidiness. Tidiness separates species and creates work, whereas order integrates, reducing work and discouraging insect attack. European gardens, often extraordinarily tidy, result in functional disorder and low yield. Creativity is seldom tidy.

    Perhaps we could say that tidiness is something that happens when compulsive activity replaces thoughtful creativity.

    Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture
    • order
    • creativity
    • gardens
  • The Design Squiggle

    A Website by Damien Newman
    thedesignsquiggle.com
    Image from thedesignsquiggle.com on 2020-05-13 at 2.59.19 PM.jpeg

    The Design Squiggle is a simple illustration of the design process. The journey of researching, uncovering insights, generating creative concepts, iteration of prototypes and eventually concluding in one single designed solution. It is intended to convey the feeling of the journey. Beginning on the left with mess and uncertainty and ending on the right in a single point of focus: the design.

    1. ​​Design skirmishes​​
    2. ​​Wonder Plots​​
    3. ​​Embracing the mess​​
    4. ​​The Design Diagram​​
    5. ​​On Greatness​​
    • design
    • process
    • creativity
    • iteration
  • Begin with your work

    A Quote by Edward Tufte

    In doing creative work, do not start your day with addictive time-vampires such as The New York Times, email, and Twitter. All scatter the eye, and mind, produce diverting vague anxiety, clutter short-term memory. Instead, begin with your work. Many creative workers have independently discovered this principle.

    • creativity
    • work
  • The evolution of devices

    All the first antecedents of man's devices were given him by Nature. Every one of his devices is traceable back to something in nature which suggested the first remote and primitive beginnings of its evolution. And every feature in art that man's mind conceived is conceived by a mind that has evolved as a part of nature: that grew out of nature.

    The evolution of devices is as much a natural process as the evolution of organisms.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    1. ​​The Evolution of Useful Things​​
    • creativity

    In all of history, not a single new thing has ever been made.

  • Leveling up aptitude

    Image from www.ribbonfarm.com on 2021-07-31 at 10.29.18 AM.png

    Your first short story takes 10 days to write. The next one 5 days, the next one 2.5 days, the next one 1.25 days. Then 0.625 days, at which point you’re probably hitting raw typing speed limits. In practice, improvement curves have more of a staircase quality to them. Rather than fix the obvious next bottleneck of typing speed (who cares if it took you 3 hours instead of 6 to write a story; the marginal value of more speed is low at that point), you might level up and decide to (say) write stories with better developed characters. Or illustrations. So you’re back at 10 days, but on a new level.

    This kind of improvement replaces quantitative improvement (optimization) with qualitative leveling up, or dimensionality increase. Each time you hit diminishing returns, you open up a new front. You’re never on the slow endzone of a learning curve. You self-disrupt before you get stuck.

    The interesting thing is, this is not purely a function not of raw prowess or innate talent, but of imagination and taste.

    Venkatesh Rao, Mediocratopia
    www.ribbonfarm.com
    • learning
    • creativity
    • taste
    • practice
  • Thinking in situations

    Naturally, practice is not preceded but followed by theory.
    Such study promotes a more lasting teaching and learning
    through experience. Its aim is development of creativeness
    realized in discovery and invention – the criteria of creativity,
    or flexibility, being imagination and fantasy. Altogether
    it promotes “thinking in situations,” a new educational concept
    unfortunately little known and less cultivated, so far.

    Josef Albers, Interaction of Color
    • learning
    • creativity
    • practice
  • To prove it in purity

    The series of photos of the 1959 model ends or stops with the photograph in which Kiesler triumphantly shows us the shell of his house like the remains of a creature taken from the seabed, a kind of Moby Dick harpooned and finally captured after the obsessive pursuit of a project that has taken up ten years of the life of the architect.

    "I think that everybody has only one basic creative idea and no matter how he is driven off, you will find that he always comes back to it until he has a chance to prove it in purity, or die with the idea unrealized." — Frederick Kiesler

    Smiljan Radić, Some Remains of My Heroes Found Scattered Across a Vacant Lot
    • creativity
    • life
    • obsession
    • passion
  • Live your ten years

    Artists are only creative for 10 years...we engineers are no different. Live your 10 years to the full.

    Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises
    • creativity
    • art
    • engineering
  • We feel it in our fingers

    In System A, there is no architect separate from the contractor. We are builders, simply. As builders, we have a direct feeling about construction. We feel it in our fingers, so it is down to earth. One result of this down-to-earth quality is that everything is somewhat experimental. We make experiments all the time. Sometimes we place a piece of wood this way. Another time, we may like to try it that way. Any time something new comes up in the design of a building, we are very likely to try and invent the best way of building it. This is not a great big invention. Just a simple invention, the way we might invent a way of tying a piece of string, to hold a broken toy together. It is just practical.

    Christopher Alexander, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
    1. ​​In Defence of Intuition​​
    • invention
    • creativity
    • problems
  • To stand independent of himself

    The creator’s love for his work is not a greedy possessiveness; he never desires to subdue his work to himself but always to subdue himself to his work. The more genuinely creative he is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself.

    Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
    • creativity
  • Violence to the very structure of our being

    If we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe, we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being. If so, it is a serious matter, since we have seen already the unhappy results of handling any material in a way that runs counter to the natural law of its structure.

    Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
    • creativity
    • work
    • life
    • material
  • Intense activity, then relaxation

    The working style is based on periods of intense activity, coupled with other periods of more relaxed, reflective contemplation. This working style may not be a reflection of a particular personality trait, but a necessary aspect of creative work, which requires alternating intense effort with relaxation.

    Nigel Cross & Anita Clayburn Cross, Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray
    • creativity
  • Mondegreen

    A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to clearly hear a lyric, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.

    American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, writing that as a girl, when her mother read to her from Percy's Reliques, she had misheard the lyric "layd him on the green" in the fourth line of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" as "Lady Mondegreen".

    Wikipedia
    en.wikipedia.org
    1. ​​Misinterpretation as inspiration​​
    • creativity
    • understanding
    • words
    • mondegreens
  • Misinterpretation as inspiration

    A lot of people think dreams and drugs involve some magical inspiration. I think otherwise.

    I rarely get inspired by dreams or drugs, but I have my own secret source of inspiration: mishearing other people. Somebody says something, I misinterpret it, and the misinterpretation is quite interesting – more interesting than anything I would have come up with on my own if asked to generate an interesting idea. Maybe it’s a clever joke or turn of phrase. Maybe it’s a neat idea. Sometimes I misunderstand people’s entire positions, and end up with positions much more interesting than the ones they were trying to push.

    Scott Alexander, Negative Creativity
    slatestarcodex.com
    1. ​​Mondegreen​​
    • mistakes
    • interest
    • drugs
    • dreams
    • creativity
    • mondegreens
  • Logjam

    1. That there is a big danger in working in a single medium. The logjam you don’t even know you’re stuck in will be broken by a shift in representation.
    Michael Sorkin, Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know
    • creativity
    • media
  • The fountainhead of beauty

    It might be said that the carving of a woodblock encompasses the greatest restriction on freedom. Printmakers come under extraordinary natural constraints on their work. Strangely enough, however, it is this restriction that is the fount of beauty. Constraint and restriction themselves become a blessing.

    ...Many people see a lack of freedom as the death knell of art. That may be true in the case of the fine arts, but in the handicrafts, lack of freedom is the fountainhead of beauty.

    Yanagi Sōetsu, Woodblock Prints
    • constraints
    • creativity
  • The final architectural embellishments

    The final architectural embellishments for the neighborhood should be the most exceptional, a kind of punctuation by relief, the last bursts of creative potential as the scene shifts.

    Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan
    • ornament
    • creativity
  • Reduced to an act of selection

    “The more exact and complete the criteria are, the more creative the work becomes. The creative act is reduced to an act of selection.”

    — Karl Gerstner, Designing Programmes (1963)

    Ellen Lupton & J. Abbott Miller, The ABC's of ▲■●: The Bauhaus and Design Theory
    • creativity
  • A normal wooden pencil

    Aaron: You know that story about how NASA spent millions of dollars developing this pen that writes in Zero G? And how Russia solved the problem?

    Abe: Yeah, they used a pencil.

    Shane Carruth, Primer
    • problems
    • creativity
    • constraints
    • cosmos
  • Information remix

    Effective writing stems from intelligently connecting the dots between the concepts you understand and can articulate. It stands to reason, then, that in order to generate more creativity you must not only add to a knowledge base, but deepen and expand the number of connections within the totality of the network. By establishing and explicitly mapping your knowledge, you allow yourself the freedom to remix information. You will often find that solutions come from previously unsuspected fields or topics—proving to be analogous in some shape or form.

    Will Darwin, Building a knowledge base
    www.willdarwin.com
    • connection
    • creativity
    • writing
    • networks
  • Let the body wander

    If the mind needs to wander, best let the body do the same. A short walk is more effective in coming up with an idea than pouring all the coffee in the world down your gullet.

    Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design
    • thinking
    • walking
    • creativity
  • The research agenda

    Important connections are often made by accident, outside the bounds of our research agenda.

    Karen L. Kramer, The Spoken and the Unspoken
    1. ​​The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge​​
    • creativity
  • Use

    I am pleading for the abolition of the word “use”, and for the freeing of the human spirit. To be sure, we shall thus free some harmless cranks. To be sure, we shall thus waste some precious dollars. But what is infinitely more important is that we shall be striking the shackles off the human mind and setting it free for the adventures which in our own day have, on the one hand, taken Hale and Rutherford and Einstein and their peers millions upon millions of miles into the uttermost realms of space and, on the other, loosed the boundless energy imprisoned in the atom.

    Abraham Flexner, The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
    • creativity
  • A blue glow

    The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well - the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.

    Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
    • i
    • creativity
    • thinking
    • life
  • As something we have never seen before

    A true revelation, it seems to me, will emerge only from stubborn concentration on a solitary problem. I am not in league with inventors or adventurous, nor with travelers to exotic destinations. The surest - also the quickest - way to awake the sense of wonder in ourselves is to look intently, undeterred, at a single object. Suddenly, miraculously, it will reveal itself as something we have never seen before.

    Cesare Pavese, Dialoghi con Leucò
    • problems
    • creativity
  • Leave the road when you wish

    The subject of this book is not typographic solitude, but the old, well-traveled roads at the core of the tradition: paths that each of us is free to follow or not, and to enter and leave when we choose – if only we know the paths are there and have a sense of where they lead. That freedom is denied us if the tradition is concealed or left for dead. Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown.

    If you use this book as a guide, by all means leave the road when you wish. That is precisely the use of a road: to reach individually chosen points of departure. By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.

    Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
    • creativity
  • From one Arte to another

    New ideas would come about by a connexion and transferring of the observations of one Arte, to the uses of another, when the experience of several misteries shall fall under consideration of one mans minde.

    Sir Francis Bacon, The Two Books of The Proficience and Advancement of Learning
    • creativity
    • ideas
  • The scale of human experience

    It is the scale of human experience, from which thought and imagination take off, and to which they must return.

    Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure
    • creativity
    • experience
  • Memory & Fantasy

    Memory and fantasy are related, as are recollection and imagination; one who cannot remember also cannot imagine, as memory is the very soil of imagination.

    Robert McCarter & Juhani Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture
    • creativity
    • memory
  • Flurry and lapse

    "The process in creating that kind of canvas was like—what?—10 percent action and 90 percent ass scratching. First you prepared yourself, cleaning up and arranging your palette and tools, sweeping the floors, and then finally, when you were ready, you faced the empty white expanse of white canvas and made your first stroke."

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    • intent
    • creativity
    • making
  • The world itself dreams

    For Plato and many medieval philosophers, imagination was construed primarily as a mimetic act of mirroring, representing, copying. This approach was often associated with deceit and illusion, with confounding original realities with secondary substitutes. By contrast, for Kant and the romantics—including German idealists and existentialists like Sartre—imagination was hailed as a productive force in its own right, the source of all true meaning and value.

    Bachelard resisted both extremes. For him, imagination was at once receptive and creative—an acoustic of listening and an art of participation. The two functions, passive and active, were inseparable. The world itself dreams, he said, and we help give it voice.

    Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
    • imagination
    • creativity

    From Richard Kearney's introduction.

  • Babble and Prune

    For those who read and listen much more than they speak (guilty), an overly-strict Prune filter is applied to their writing; when these people go to write something of their own, their minds don’t produce thoughts nearly as “coherent, witty or wise as their hyper-developed Prune filter is used to processing”.

    Hence, my dilemma and an opportunity to break out of this trap. I recognised that if I attempted to write at the quality I was used to reading at, first time every time, my brain would promptly grind to a halt—like trying to brainstorm with a group that laughs at your suggestions.

    Will Darwin, The Artist and the Critic
    • writing
    • creativity
  • Write the books you want to read

    An Article by Austin Kleon
    austinkleon.com
    401FA060-9ED9-4007-8C78-1C6586CC8FBA.jpeg

    A few nights ago, I was looking at the moon and I thought, “I’d like to read a cultural history of the moon.” I googled, and there it was. My friend Matt said, “Ideally, that is exactly how one should find everything they read…and write.”

    It’s really that simple. You find the books you want to read… and if you can’t find them, you write them.

    1. ​​Things Learned Blogging​​
    • intuition
    • creativity
    • desire
    • making
  • Inheriting Froebel's Gifts

    A Podcast by Kurt Kohlstedt
    99percentinvisible.org
    Image from 99percentinvisible.org on 2022-05-24 at 4.32.53 PM.jpeg

    Froebel’s Gifts were meant to be given in a particular order, growing more complex over time and teaching different lessons about shape, structure and perception along the way. A soft knitted ball could be given to a child just six weeks old, followed by a wooden ball and then a cube, illustrating similarities and differences in shapes and materials. Then kids would get a cylinder (which combines elements of both the ball and the cube) and it would blow their little minds. Some objects were pierced by strings or rods so kids could spin them and see how one shapes morphs into another when set into motion. Later came cubes made up of smaller cubes and other hybrids, showing children how parts relate to a whole through deconstruction and reassembly.

    These perception-oriented “Gifts” would then give way to construction-oriented “Occupations.” Kids would be told to build things out of materials like paper, string, wire, or little sticks and peas that could be connected and stacked into structures.

    1. ​​Gifts and occupations​​
    • learning
    • childhood
    • objects
    • creativity
    • form
  • 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.

    • music
    • creativity
    • novelty
    • exploration
    • curiosity
  • Makers and Making

    An Article by Alan Jacobs
    blog.ayjay.org

    The [Silmarils] are good; their making was at least potentially innocent; but afterward arose a lust for owning and controlling that led to great tragedy… The aspect of humanity which the elves represent most fully – both for good and ill – is the creative one.”

    And this is why “making” in and of itself is not the answer to our decadent moment. “Love of things, especially artificial things, could be seen as the besetting sin of modern civilisation, and in a way a new one, not quite Avarice and not quite Pride, but somehow attached to both” – and this is the Fëanor Temptation. It is in light of this temptation that I advocate repair, which is a mode of caring for what we have not made, but rather what we have inherited. We will not be saved by the making of artifacts — or from the repair of them, either; but the imperative of repair has these salutary effects: it reminds us of our debt to those who came before us and of the fragility of human constructs.

    1. ​​The Silmarillion​​
    2. ​​Rethinking Repair​​
    • repair
    • making
    • creativity
    • humanity
  • The McDonald’s Theory of Creativity

    An Article by Jon Bell
    jonbell.medium.com

    I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s.

    An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!

    It’s as if we’ve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonald’s Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.

    1. ​​The surprising effectiveness of writing and rewriting​​
    • creativity
    • ideas
    • repair
  • The Helsinki Bus Station Theory

    An Article by Arno Rafael Minkkinen
    www.fotocommunity.com

    Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus.

    Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.

    The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest.

    ...It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

    Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

    Your vision takes off.

    • creativity
    • practice
    • photography
    • experience
  • Design Systems, Agile, and Industrialization

    An Article by Brad Frost
    bradfrost.com
    Image from bradfrost.com on 2020-09-10 at 1.41.24 PM.png

    I’ve come to the conclusion that “enterprise web development” is just regular web development, only stripped of any joy or creativity or autonomy. It’s plugging a bunch of smart people into the matrix and forcing them to crank out widgets and move the little cards to the right.

    In these structures, people are stripped of their humanity as they’re fed into the machine. It becomes “a developer resource is needed” rather than “Oh, Samantha would be a great fit for this project.” And the effect of all this on individuals is depressing. When people’s primary motivation is to move tickets over a column, their ability to be creative or serve a higher purpose are almost completely quashed. Interaction with other humans seems to be relegated to yelling at others to tell them they’re blocked.

    Reading “AS PER THE REQUIREMENTS” in tickets makes me dry heave. How did such sterile, shitty language seep into my everyday work?

    1. ​​Beware SAFe, an Unholy Incarnation of Darkness​​
    • www
    • agile
    • systems
    • creativity
  • Input as collage

    An Article by Austin Kleon
    austinkleon.com

    Your output depends on your input, but a lot of your input is random: you’re interested in lots of different things, and those things, occasionally, will talk to each other in your work.

    Lately I’ve been thinking about being more intentional with input. Thinking about input as collage. Taking the principle of juxtaposition (1+1=3) and using that to guide your input: what weird, seemingly disparate things can you feed your brain that will come out later in a new mix?

    The input collage can be subject or genre based and even better if it’s multi-media.

    ...There’s a balance here between feeding your brain intentionally and then backing off and letting your brain do the subconscious work of mixing your inputs together.

    • creativity
    • intent
  • Touch the keys

    An Article by Rach Smith
    rachsmith.com

    In his course Being Productive: Simple Steps to Calm Focus, Kourosh Dini emphasises the importance of taking a moment to “be with” the work every day (or however frequently you need to tackle a project). “Being with” your work is to be fully present and intentional about that activity and doing nothing else.

    This idea was inspired by Dini’s piano teacher, who encouraged him to sit at his piano and touch the keys every day. Even on the days that he felt he had no time or inclination to practice. Sometimes touching the keys would lead to a good practice session, even when he didn’t feel like it would before he actually gave it a go.

    Just like Dini, I find that once I give the task my full attention and be present, the actual doing of it turns out to be much easier and more enjoyable than my mind had been expecting. As usual, the resistance to getting started is far more uncomfortable than actually doing the thing.

    1. ​​To pick up my pen​​
    • productivity
    • work
    • creativity
    • practice
  • To pick up my pen

    An Article by Nick Cave
    www.theredhandfiles.com

    The most important undertaking of my day is to simply sit down at my desk and pick up my pen. Without this elementary act I could not call myself a songwriter, because songs come to me in intimations too slight to be perceived, unless I am primed and ready to receive them. They come not with a fanfare, but in whispers, and they come only when I am at work.

    1. ​​Touch the keys​​
    • creativity
    • routine
  • Chance favors the prepared mind

    A Quote by Louis Pasteur
    1. ​​The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn​​
    2. ​​Preparing for problems​​
    • creativity
    • chance
  • Designer + Developer Workflow

    An Article by Dan Mall
    danmall.me

    The way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy.

    The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this:

    “Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.”

    Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us?

    • collaboration
    • making
    • holism
    • advertising
    • creativity

    Original text arranged and truncated for brevity.

  • Forget the computer — here’s why you should write and design by hand

    An Article by Herbert Lui
    uxdesign.cc
    2021-08-27 13.47.43.png

    In the middle of the 2000s, the designers at creative consultancy Landor installed Adobe Photoshop on their computers and started using it. General manager Antonio Marazza tells author David Sax:

    “Overnight, the quality of their designs seemed to decline. After a few months of this, Landor’s Milan office gave all their designers Moleskine notebooks, and banned the use of Photoshop during the first week’s work on a project. The idea was to let their initial ideas freely blossom on paper, without the inherent bias of the software, before transferring them to the computer later for fine-tuning. It was so successful, this policy remains in place today.”

    1. ​​From the desk of: Austin Kleon​​
    • writing
    • design
    • drawing
    • tools
    • creativity
  • The right box to think inside of

    A Quote by Aza Raskin
    www.robinrendle.com

    Design is not about learning to think outside the box, it’s about finding the right box to think inside of.

    • design
    • thinking
    • creativity
  • Enjoying the garden together

    A Quote by Brian Eno
    blog.ayjay.org

    And essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life.

    What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.

    • creativity
    • music
    • making
    • art
    • gardens
  • Hacking is the opposite of marketing

    An Article by Tom MacWright
    macwright.com

    One of my favorite definitions of “hacking” is the creative reuse of tools for new and unexpected purposes. Hacking is using your email account as a hard drive, using your bicycle seat to open a beer, using Minecraft’s red bricks to create a calculator in the game.

    The opposite of hacking is marketing. Marketing tells you that this particular non-stick pan is the pan you’ll use to make omelettes, and you’ll do it in the morning dressed in fashionable clothing in a nice kitchen. It includes a photo and inspirational copywriting to drive this home. Marketing dictates a style, context, and purpose for even the most general-purpose products. This narrative needs to be specific so that you can readily imagine it: it’s you, in an Airbnb, laughing with friends.

    1. ​​All sorts of ways to use the machine​​
    2. ​​In ways you didn't anticipate​​
    3. ​​Stretching the product​​
    • tools
    • advertising
    • creativity
    • utility
  • Waiting around to write

    A Quote by Gertrude Stein
    subtlemaneuvers.substack.com

    If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year. To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half hour a day.

    • writing
    • creativity
  • In defense of disorder: on career, creativity, and professionalism

    An Essay by Chia Amisola
    chias.blog

    Professionalism is a lie, build what you love, explore everything. In today’s age of creation, anyone who attempts to tell you otherwise is lying. You’ll end up seeking what you traded for the rest of your life.

    1. ​​Successful careers are not planned​​
    • work
    • creativity
    • bureaucracy
  • Negative Creativity

    An Article by Scott Alexander
    slatestarcodex.com

    Coming up with entirely novel ideas is really, really hard.

    1. ​​Misinterpretation as inspiration​​
    2. ​​Sit Down And Think About It For Five Minutes​​
    • ideas
    • creativity
    • metaphor
  • 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki

    A Documentary by Hayao Miyazaki
    www3.nhk.or.jp

    An exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the genius of Japan's foremost living film director, Hayao Miyazaki — creator of some of the world's most iconic and enduring anime feature films.

    • animation
    • film
    • creativity
  • The Microsoft Sound

    A Quote by Brian Eno
    www.sfgate.com

    The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long."

    I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.

    In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

    • music
    • constraints
    • time
    • creativity
  • 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.

    1. ​​A constant dialogue​​
    2. ​​Constant reflection and refinement​​
    1. ​​How do you know when your paintings are finished?​​
    2. ​​Designing with code​​
    • art
    • www
    • creativity
    • process
    • code
  • Early work

    An Essay by Paul Graham
    www.paulgraham.com

    Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do.

    1. ​​The right way to deal with new ideas​​
    2. ​​Focus on the rate of change​​
    • creativity
    • skill
    • ideas
  • The Small Group

    An Article by James Mulholland
    jmulholland.com

    Lying somewhere between a club and a loosely defined set of friends, the SMALL GROUP is a repeated theme in the lives of the successful. Benjamin Franklin had the Junto Club, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had The Inklings, Jobs and Wozniak had Homebrew.

    Around a dozen members is the sweet spot of social motivation: small enough to know everyone, yet large enough that the group won’t collapse if one or two members’ enthusiasm wanes; small enough that you are not daunted by competing with the whole world, yet large enough that you still need to be on your toes to keep up.

    1. ​​Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees​​
    2. ​​Mutual appreciation​​
    3. ​​Scenius​​
    4. ​​Tossing an idea around​​
    • teamwork
    • creativity
    • innovation
    • collaboration

    I also think of artist collectives like Robert Irwin's early work at the Ferus Gallery. But it also seems that you can't just get any 12 people together and have it work as a truly creative SMALL GROUP – most startups I feel would not necessarily fit this description. Probably the members need to be doing the same kind of work, not just working on the same thing.

  • Scenius

    A Definition by Brian Eno
    kk.org

    Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.

    1. ​​The Small Group​​
    2. ​​Mutual appreciation​​
    3. ​​Tossing an idea around​​
    • culture
    • genius
    • creativity
    • collaboration
  • You and Your Research

    A Speech by Richard Hamming
    www.cs.virginia.edu

    This talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question "Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?"

    1. ​​Important problems​​
    2. ​​Open doors, open minds​​
    3. ​​Inverting the problem​​
    4. ​​Intellectual investment is like compound interest​​
    5. ​​Great people can tolerate ambiguity​​
    1. ​​The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn​​
    • research
    • discovery
    • creativity
    • learning
  • Don't think big

    An Article by Ralph Ammer
    ralphammer.com
    Image from ralphammer.com on 2020-07-27 at 5.05.16 PM.gif

    One of the biggest mistakes you can make in your creative project is to pick a topic which is too big. Big topics often lead to small results, small topics foster great results.

    And here is why: Your project is limited by the time and energy you have.

    These are the boundaries of your project. If you pick a huge topic then there is not much room for your creative efforts. On the other hand, if you pick a small topic you have time and energy to make a great creative contribution.

    • creativity

See also:
  1. making
  2. ideas
  3. learning
  4. practice
  5. writing
  6. work
  7. problems
  8. thinking
  9. life
  10. constraints
  11. design
  12. collaboration
  13. art
  14. music
  15. experience
  16. intent
  17. process
  18. www
  19. gardens
  20. mondegreens
  21. tools
  22. advertising
  23. repair
  24. i
  25. chance
  26. memory
  27. cosmos
  28. connection
  29. networks
  30. iteration
  31. invention
  32. imagination
  33. media
  34. research
  35. discovery
  36. teamwork
  37. innovation
  38. culture
  39. genius
  40. walking
  41. agile
  42. systems
  43. ornament
  44. order
  45. skill
  46. code
  47. time
  48. animation
  49. film
  50. understanding
  51. words
  52. metaphor
  53. mistakes
  54. interest
  55. drugs
  56. dreams
  57. bureaucracy
  58. utility
  59. taste
  60. material
  61. drawing
  62. holism
  63. intuition
  64. desire
  65. engineering
  66. obsession
  67. passion
  68. productivity
  69. routine
  70. photography
  71. humanity
  72. novelty
  73. exploration
  74. curiosity
  75. childhood
  76. objects
  77. form
  1. Brian Eno
  2. Will Darwin
  3. Michael Sorkin
  4. Matthias Ott
  5. Hayao Miyazaki
  6. Scott Alexander
  7. Dorothy Sayers
  8. Austin Kleon
  9. Sir Francis Bacon
  10. Robert Bringhurst
  11. Cesare Pavese
  12. Nicholson Baker
  13. Josef Albers
  14. David Pye
  15. Louis Pasteur
  16. Abraham Flexner
  17. Karen L. Kramer
  18. Cyril Stanley Smith
  19. Robert McCarter
  20. Juhani Pallasmaa
  21. Shane Carruth
  22. Lawrence Wechler
  23. Robert Irwin
  24. Damien Newman
  25. Christopher Alexander
  26. Gaston Bachelard
  27. Ralph Ammer
  28. Edward Tufte
  29. Richard Hamming
  30. James Mulholland
  31. Frank Chimero
  32. Ellen Lupton
  33. J. Abbott Miller
  34. Brad Frost
  35. Bill Mollison
  36. Paul Graham
  37. Yanagi Sōetsu
  38. Chia Amisola
  39. Tom MacWright
  40. Gertrude Stein
  41. Venkatesh Rao
  42. Nigel Cross
  43. Anita Clayburn Cross
  44. Herbert Lui
  45. Aza Raskin
  46. Dan Mall
  47. Smiljan Radić
  48. Rach Smith
  49. Nick Cave
  50. Arno Rafael Minkkinen
  51. Jon Bell
  52. Alan Jacobs
  53. Kurt Kohlstedt