Thoughts & Ideas
On Greatness
v0.crap
- ââWriting, Brieflyââ
Shaped and reshaped
A distinct and complementary stance
But bulldozers move mountains
Argue against the best
Half-winged, half-imprisoned
Curiosity spurred on
From one Arte to another
The Innovation Funnel
The power of One
An Article by Kathy SierraIt's not teams that are the problem, it's the rabid insistence on teamwork. Group think. Committee decisions.
Most truly remarkable ideas did not come from teamwork. Most truly brave decisions were not made through teamwork. The team's role should be to act as a supportive environment for a collection of individuals. People with their own unique voice, ideas, thoughts, perspectives. A team should be there to encourage one another to pursue the wild ass ideas, not get in lock step to keep everything cheery and pleasant.
A bad tweet is like a deepfake of an idea
AÂ Fragment by Ryan BroderickI guess what youâre describing is like a tweet that hits the uncanny valley of good and bad in such a precise way, with such confidence, that it just pisses everybody off.
Because if you look at this tweet for just a second youâre like ok, thatâs a fine bedroom, but then you look at it, and it starts to unravel in your mind, like trying to remember a dream after you just woke up. And youâre like âwhat is this?â Itâs like a deepfake of a personâs face.
âŚOk, Iâve got some fire for you: A bad tweet is like a deepfake of an idea.
The perfect bad tweet is like something you read and youâre like âok yeahâ but then youâre like, âwaitâŚâ, and it just starts to come apart in your mind and youâre like that makes no fucking sense, just like this photo of this incredibly bad room.
The McDonaldâs Theory of Creativity
An Article by Jon BellI use a trick with co-workers when weâre trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonaldâs.
An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we canât possibly go to McDonaldâs, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!
Itâs as if weâve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonaldâs Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.
Eulogy for Steve Jobs
An Article by Jonathan IveHe was without doubt the most inquisitive human I have ever met. His insatiable curiosity was not limited or distracted by his knowledge or expertise, nor was it casual or passive. It was ferocious, energetic and restless. His curiosity was practiced with intention and rigor.
Many of us have an innate predisposition to be curious. I believe that after a traditional education, or working in an environment with many people, curiosity is a decision requiring intent and discipline.
In larger groups our conversations gravitate towards the tangible, the measurable. It is more comfortable, far easier and more socially acceptable talking about what is known. Being curious and exploring tentative ideas were far more important to Steve than being socially acceptable.
Our curiosity begs that we learn. And for Steve, wanting to learn was far more important than wanting to be right.
- ââSteve Jobsââ
Ideas behind their time
An Article by Tim HarfordThese days I am more interested in the reverse case [of Da Vinci's helicopter]: ideas that could have worked many centuries before they actually appeared. The economist Alex Tabarrok calls these âideas behind their timeâ
Curious minds want to know why these ideas appeared so late â and whether there might be anything that would prevent delays in future. One explanation is that the ideas arenât as simple as they appear.
The bicycle is not as straightforward an invention as it seems. To move from ox-hauled cart to human-powered bicycle requires smooth-rolling wheel bearings, which in turn need precisely engineered bearing balls. Modern steel ball bearings were not patented until the late 1700s, and demand from the 19th-century bicycle industry helped to improve their design.
Negative Creativity
An Article by Scott AlexanderComing up with entirely novel ideas is really, really hard.
Early work
An Essay by Paul GrahamImagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do.
The Top Idea in Your Mind
An Essay by Paul GrahamI think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.
The still life effect
AÂ Fragment by Paul GrahamIf you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head. You'd think. But people don't. In fact, this is a constant problem when you're painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you're so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you're kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it's too late.
A lightbulb is not an idea
An Article by Ralph AmmerWith conventional placeholders, such as words, we can describe patterns for a large number of situations. On the other hand it is easy to fool yourself (and others) with words, since you can avoid to be specific. Any business meeting can confirm this.
When you draw something you are forced to be specific â and honest.
Our illustration of an âideaâ from above is unconventional in the sense that it conveys specific original thoughts of what an idea is. It adds value to the words.
And that is the catch: The drawing must be unconventional to support the conventional words. We have to make sure not to use âwords in disguiseâ. Take a common illustration for âideaâ for example, which haunts flip charts all over the world: the lightbulb.
The lightbulb image works on a purely symbolic level, it only replaces the word âideaâ. This image of a household item contains no original thought about what an idea is. While symbols like these work well as international replacements for words or icons to indicate a light switch for instance, they convey no nutritional value as illustrations â they are empty.
Back to the Drawing Board
The lost art of drawing for engineers and architects.
- ââYou can almost tell which software they were designed inââ
- ââConversational drawingââ
- ââThe effort heuristicââ
- ââTablets have caught upââ
You can almost tell which software they were designed in
Tatiana von Preussen, cofounder of London practice vPPR Architects, says that certain software comes with constraints that encourage a particular style:
âSomething Iâve noticed with new buildings is that you can almost tell which software they were designed in. For instance, if you take Revit, itâs very hard to freely create non-orthogonal, non-linear geometries, and itâs very easy to create repetitive elements, so it lends itself to a particular way of building.â
Conversational drawing
A skilled draughtsman guides design conversations by selecting and emphasizing details in a way that computer programmes cannot. Ron Slade, author of Sketching for Engineers and Architects and a structural director at WSP in London, calls it âconversational drawingâ. He notes how botany field guides are always based on detailed drawings rather than photographs â as much for what they leave out as for what they show. âExtraneous material that might exist in a photograph is eliminated. It may be important to pick out and illustrate particular areas and leave other parts in sketchy or broad outline.â
- ââWhy Sketch?ââ
The effort heuristic
Psychologists have noted that people tend to place greater artistic value on images when they can see the work that has gone into them â a tendency known as the âeffort heuristicâ. They are also more likely to connect emotionally with the work if they can detect the human hand, says Goldsmithsâ Chamberlain. âThereâs an argument that if we see a brush stroke, we almost recreate it, and thatâs part of the connection we feel with the artist â you can feel the intention.â
Perhaps to capitalize on this, some architects now show presentation drawings that look hand-drawn but are actually generated entirely by computer. âItâs totally fake,â says Brillhart. âThey just take a computer image into Photoshop and put filters over it to make it look like itâs drawn by hand. Itâs kind of amusing â instead of just sitting down and drawing for an hour, they spend eight hours making it look like a hand drawing.â
Tablets have caught up
But in the past couple of years, Brennan believes that tablets have caught up, with apps such as Appleâs ProCreate and Morpholioâs Trace becoming far more responsive to the userâs marks. âTablets didnât used to have that immediate response, from brain to eye to hand to pen to paper. A half-second delay has a huge impact on how you think â it causes you to stumble. But now that lagâs gone, itâs almost the same as drawing with pen on paper. You donât need to engage with the airbrushes or other features â just use it in its purest form.â The stylus, too, far more convincingly apes a manual pen: âYouâre able to tune it to almost replicate your favourite pen â and it doesnât run out of ink.
Chetwood is an iPad devotee, using it to produce fantastical urban artworks as well as architecture. Far from hindering the drawing process, he believes tablets will give rise to a new era of creative drawing. âA lot of people say technology and computers are taking away the true art of drawing. Thatâs rubbish, it releases sketching. You can move so much quicker and change things much more quickly, and it keeps a record of what youâre doing. The control is just brilliant.â The polished glass surface is the only flaw, but textured acetates applied to the screen can make it feel more like paper.
- ââPlatformsââ