creativity

If you’re in London Ontario this Saturday afternoon come to the Central Library for the Indie Media Fair. I’ll be doing a workshop at 3 pm on the convergence of social and independent media. I didn’t come up with the theme but it certainly resonates with me. I went to the fair last year and [...]

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Generativity: maybe the most important word we’ll use in the next 10 years. It applies to all aspects of the challenges we face: social, technological, cultural, intellectual, economic. There’s a big article in the newest Atlantic that got me thinking about it: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America: If it persists much longer, this [...]

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Of everything I’ve written, I think The New Pragmatist has retained the most value. I told someone two years ago I was going to clean it up and publish a PDF, but I got pulled away from it by too many new ideas to have any patience for futzing around with something old… until now: [...]

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First I’m going to straight-up admit I don’t have the disposition for them. I just don’t like sitting or standing in any audience or crowd. But I have reasons as well. In a way, the bigger the crowd, the less social it becomes. Of course it’s social in a really basic way, but there isn’t [...]

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Learning as a Craft

by Brian on 01-18-2010

in creativity,culture,education

Read The Craftsman by Richard Sennett — one of my favourite thinkers. This book gets right to the heart of things. From the publisher’s description: Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship [...]

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Picking up the Thinking in the 21st Century thread again… I’m nearing the end of the most philosophical stuff. It all turns on this one… Just a reminder to read this as a proposal — a basis for refinement and elaboration (not to mention citations and evidence), not presuming finality. A few weeks ago I [...]

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Literally! Out of all the things buzzing in my head for a “new decade” post, the idea I want to highlight most is the increasing importance of making stuff. It’s been germinating in my mind via MakerCulture in the Making by UWO + Ryerson’s online journalism classes. Last week it was crystalized by Umair Haque’s “Builders’ Manifesto” [...]

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The premise of this series is to work out a new way of looking at our changing world» Part of the reason we’ve had so much difficulty making sense of the complex events of the past decade is that our ways of thinking — specifically, the metaphors, analogies, and images we resort to — have [...]

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What happens when innovation is done well? Well… a lot of things happen. One of them is you get a lot more attention — which is harder and harder to come by these days: What is it that makes the economy hum, but is not growing? What’s the limiting factor behind all those web pages, [...]

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Some readers may have noticed I’ve been getting little deeper and more technical lately. I’m trying to unburden myself of all of the theoretical equipment I’ve been using for the past few years — trying to make it explicit, get it out into the open, into the light of day. I should stress it’s just [...]

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Creative Relationships

by Brian on 11-28-2009

in art,creativity,education

Jotted this down just before falling asleep last night: As opposed to someone who thinks along conventional lines, someone who is genuinely creative constantly and actively looks for potential complementarity in everyone they meet — not just asking “who is this person and “what have they done,” but digging deeper to ask “what potential is there [...]

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Reflecting on last weekend’s talk on creativity I worried that probably emphasized the “open” aspect of the creative cycle at the expense of the “closed” aspect. My gist seemed to be, “Don’t worry about anything… try everything, and fantastic creations will magically appear.” Given the circumstances, I’m happy I erred that way rather than the other. We [...]

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