Tag: creativity
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In Evolution, Adaptability Beats Fitness
The longest continuous evolution experiment was started in 1988 and is still ongoing. The study, examining the “evolvability” of Escherichia coli (E. coli), has recently surpassed 52,000 generations and has had a sample of the population frozen and saved every 75 days (every 500 generations). The wealth of data obtained is fantastic and these frozen ancestors have been the…
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Steve Jobs’ View on the Web and Creativity (1996)
In 1996, while he was still the CEO of NeXT, Steve Jobs was interviewed by Wired writer Gary Wolf. The result was a sometimes quaint, occasionally prophetic and often pessimistic exchange. In this far-reaching (and somewhat lengthy) discussion with Steve Jobs, the two discuss the forthcoming ubiquity of “the web dial tone”, how technology doesn’t change…
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Ira Glass on Being Wrong and Manufacturing Inspiration
Discussing how many great stories “hinge on people being wrong”, Kathryn Schulz interviews This American Life host Ira Glass on the benefits of being wrong. I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually…
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The Ideas of Frank Chimero
Designer Frank Chimero presents his ‘Ideas’: his manifesto of sorts principles on creativity, motivation and innovation. Chimero briefly covers seven topics, entitled: Why is Greater Than How Not More. Instead, Better. Surprise + Clarity = Delight Sincire, Authentic & Honest No Silver Bullets, No Secrets Quality + Sincerity = Enthusiasm Everything is Something or Other I’m…
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Scientifically-Proven Ways to Improve Creativity
Fourteen acts or mindsets that have been shown–using science!–to increase creativity, from a two-article series on scientifically-proven methods to increase your creativity: Psychological distance: Imagine your creative task as distant and disconnected from your current location. Chronological distance: Project yourself or the task forward in time. Absurdist stimulation: Read some Kafka: absurdity is a ‘meaning threat’,…
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Sleep for Creativity
Dreams are not “meaningless narratives” but are “layered with significance and substance”, laments insomniac Jonah Lehrer as he considers the importance of dreaming for creativity: A group of students was given a tedious task that involved transforming a long list of number strings into a new set of number strings. This required the subjects to…
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Creativity Stages and ‘Flow’
After intently studying people at work in a diverse range of fields, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi outlined what he determined to be the five stages of the creative process in his book Creativity: Preparation: Becoming immersed, consciously or not, in a set of problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity. Incubation: A period whereby ideas…
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Innovation of Innovation
The costs of innovation have exceeded the benefits, says Umair Haque, and it’s time to move away from this “relic of the industrial era” towards something specifically “built for the 21st century”. Haque has dubbed this the almost too hip Awesomeness Manifesto. The three problems with innovation as it stands, according to Haque: Innovation relies on…
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Your Job as an Artist
Andrew Keen, the so-called Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley, tackles his common ground of technology and creativity in a piece from the Telegraph where he hopes to discover Why are Artists so Poor? After a bit of Twittering, Andrew found that his: responses extended to everything from lucid one-worders like “oversupply” to philosophical tweets such as…
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Free: Interview with Chris Anderson
Whether you’ve read it or not, you’re undoubtedly aware that Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, has written a new book: Free. I haven’t read the book but can likely guess the premise—and given that the unabridged audiobook can be downloaded online I’ll no doubt be giving it a…