creativity

Yesterday’s announcement of new copyright legislation in Canada was met with the expected array of complaints from complainers, aka bloggers, slackers, n’er-do-wells, social deviants, hipsters, and cultural parasites. They received the news as an affront to their supposed “freedom” to exchange intellectual and aesthetic work and reshape existing artifacts into new “creations.” The dispute comes [...]

Creating a Platform for Collaboration

by Brian on 02-22-2010

in media,web

Yesterday I read a really interesting story about a project to develop a new tool for researchers at the massive CERN laboratory (the folks who made that gigantic particle accelerator in Switzerland) to collaborate and share expertise more effectively. It’s a great complement to what John Seely Brown and John Hagel recently wrote about growing [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Another Look at LDNbeta

by LDNbeta on 08-30-2009

in a2bb,civics,london

No I haven’t forgot about the little endeavour I launched in May: I started thinking we need someplace to just try stuff. If it works, then great: we can replicate it on our own sites or even develop something more permanent, public, and professional. If it doesn’t work, then that’s ok too: without actually losing [...]

8-Shaped People

by OpenConceptual on 07-22-2009

in concepts

We’ve been hearing for years about “T-shaped people” (with deep knowledge and competence in one or two areas, crossed with wide knowledge across many domains); Microsoft’s Bill Buxton recently wrote about “I-shaped people”: These have their feet firmly planted in the mud of the practical world, and yet stretch far enough to stick their head [...]

Designing Ideas for Democracy

by OpenConceptual on 07-19-2009

in concepts

[Update: within minutes I decided to change the title to "Designing Ideas for Democracy" -- replacing "methodologies" with "ideas" -- which occurred to me after I thought about search results, then realized "ideas" is more appropriate anyways.] This will be the provisional mission for Open/Conceptual. As usual, “designing methodologies ideas for democracy” is something that [...]

Burying the Best and the Brightest

by OpenConceptual on 07-09-2009

in commentary

I’ve been thinking about the pernicious effects of our overachievement society again, this time by way of Philip Delves Broughton (via NYTimes Opinionator), in a post called The McNamara Syndrome. The following is actually from the author’s book, Ahead of the Curve: One of the most famous alumni of Harvard’s MBA program is Robert McNamara, [...]

I was going to do this Thursday night but I got sidetracked.  Dan Brown at the The London Free Press took up my challenge (which was “both 100% ironic and 100% sincere at the same time”) to “take a few hours or a few months to figure out what really matters” and compose it into [...]

Our Creative Roots

by OpenConceptual on 06-23-2009

in examples

A recent paper published in Science argues that our big brains aren’t what ultimately caused early human cultural development. In fact, it took maybe 100,000 years (give or take tens of thousands) for the human brain to find its mojo. What was the secret? Sure enough, when the critical population density was reached or there [...]

Reiterating the Focus in London

by Brian on 05-28-2009

in london,media

“It would be great to see #ldnbeta concept (or some other iteration) picked up and used to drive the conversation — not just here, but on people’s own blogs, on Twitter, face-to-face, everywhere – exploring and advocating new opportunities for social media in London.” In hindsight I should have focused on that point a lot [...]

The Mandate to Make Funny

by Brian on 05-18-2009

in creativity

Whenever I do a ‘humour’ post like my last one I worry for a moment about whether people will continue to take me seriously. Usually I overcome those reservations with the thought that anyone who would dismiss me for being funny (I mean, for trying to be funny) aren’t the people I’d appeal to anyways.  [...]