Dan Keldsen's Library tagged creativity →  View Popular, Search in Google

And now for something completely different - fascinating article on the serious decline of American creativity/innovation. Extending from childhood through to adults.

Absolutely agree with this article - see the same problems and opportunities every time we run an Innovation Workshop. Most adults have been taught specifically to give up on innovation - unless they are "designers" of some sort. That cedes far too much innovation energy to an incredibly small area of any given organization.

"Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way."

creativity education psychology Newsweek innovation crisis learning creative_problem_solving

New research over course of 6 years, published in December Harvard Business Review - Insead's Hal Gregersen:
"Studies have shown that creativity is close to 80 percent learned and acquired," he told CNN. "We found that it's like exercising your muscles -- if you engage in the actions you build the skills."

Exactly the argument we make in our Innovation Workshop - and while those "innovation muscles" may be creaky in many adults, it's always interesting to see how creative people can be in our final 10 minute exercise at the end of the day. Typical to have over 150 ideas surfaced in one exercise alone.

More details on the workshop at:
http://www.informationarchitected.com/services/education/one-day-innovation-workshop/

innovation_management innovation CNN Insead Harvard HBR harvard_business_review creativity apple

Interesting ideas - having a company now that is all about architecture (of a different kind than would be built by cardboard), of course I think about architecture and re-usable building blocks more than ever. Neat tweak on Legos, Cuboro, Megablocks, Lincoln Logs and other playful architectural elements. They're Bloxes, originally created by the venerable Jef Raskin of Apple fame.

Cardboard creativity
"A few months ago, the Google Open Source team had an offsite in our Chicago office, and we were looking for something fun, social, and geeky for the teams to do during informal discussions. Before that, my colleague Aza had shown me a cool new thing that he was making called Bloxes -- interlocking cardboard boxes that were something like giant legos that connected on all six sides. They were actually invented by Aza's father, Jef Raskin (who started the Macintosh project at Apple), and were originally intended to be used to build flexible workspaces (like easily morphable cubicles). Having seen some samples of what you could build with them, I thought it would be fun to order a bunch of Bloxes for the team to build things out of while sitting around chatting and brainstorming."

cardboard creativity innovation architecture experiment google

Here's a site I don't view nearly often enough. If you admire (and aspire) to understandable, and even pleasing information presentation (ala Tufte, for example), you need to go here. Now! Really!

cartography creativity charts design diagrams digital interaction maps patterns presentation statistics thinking tools visualization usability

Sir Ken Robinson is author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, and a leading expert on innovation and human resources. In this talk, he makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity,

creativity education innovation kids learning presentations teaching webcast TED

As mentioned on Roger Von Oech's CreativeThink blog, a psychology lecture series that looks quite interesting and relevant to the inventive/creative problem solving world. A shame the video collection is not downloadable as well. DVD or downloadable audio

robert_sapolsky roger_von_oech psychology creativity innovation

CREAX is an interesting company I've stumbled across, in the industrial product design space. Great examples of unique variations of existing products, and in this case, an online Flash-based Creativity test.

creativity innovation CREAX test self-assessment

I caught the webcast of Bob and Diego's 'Ten Rules for Creating Contagious Behavior'
Or "Tales of Contagion from a Double-Wide Trailer" via a recent AlwaysOn e-mail. Fits perfectly into the 'infection' them of the podcast I'm currently editing with Steph

innovation design books creativity stanford AlwaysOn

Stumbled onto Kes' lists on Amazon, and looks like a gold mine of books that I wasn't aware of it. Just what I need, even more to read!

kes_sampanthar innovation creativity thinking