What makes a person creative? Why do we care about creativity at all? And what can I do to unlock my own creativity?
Creativity is a huge buzz word these days. It’s used in businesses and schools to define that personal attribute that will let you be successful.
But I’m more interested in how creativity can be used to make our lives more interesting and full.
In his famous lectures on creativity, John Cleese says that if you play around with a problem and put off calling it done for a while, you’ll often come up with a better solution than if you simply took the first solution that came to you. Tinkering with an idea or a map or a …
I set out early yesterday morning to photograph two things: A bridge and a beaver. I knew the bridge was likely to be there. But I wasn’t so sure about the beaver. They’ve proven somewhat tricky for me just to see let alone capture on camera. Last week I was watching some birds with my …
Last weekend I got up early, grabbed my camera and headed down to a local canal-front trail to take some photographs. I was only planning on being gone for about forty-five minutes. However, when I got back to my car, I discovered I had somehow lost my keys. After searching around my car and peering …
You can design things for a variety of reasons. You might want to create something to be the tallest or the widest or the most efficient of its kind. But unless you’re specifically trying to design complexity, the simplest and most straightforward design is often the best. My son demonstrated this recently in his design …
This pencil sketch was hand drawn by my 10 year old son yesterday. He’s been reading a lot from the Warriors book series by the multiplicitous and pseudonomous Erin Hunter. After each book he tends to get inspired to create fan art like this. Now, he’s a great artist but it’s still hard to get …
For my birthday yesterday I went to a lecture by mixed media artist Mary Robinson called Shifting Perspective. She talked about the role our environment and experiences play in making art. The writeup in the paper for the lecture used the word observation to describe this. However, I found it interesting that Mary never used …
I often go to the library to try and find something entertaining, intriguing or just different. Last week I found just the thing. It was a book called Master-Mind: How to think like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova. Now this is the kind of book I love to find. After all, who wouldn’t want to be …