How can you be more creative in your professional life?
Despite our best attempts, the creative process remains a beautifully elusive aspect of the human experience. Scientific research taking a reductionist worldview has made little practical progress, and thinking about it from a magical perspective is not necessarily useful either.
This project is an experiment to better understand and document creativity from the perspective of daily practitioners. We are engineers identifying techniques to apply methodically; we are artists collecting a repertoire of ideas to play with. This is a work-in-progress, so feel free to contribute too!
By studying the praxis of creativity, we'd like to be able to answer these questions (in no particular order):
How can we become more innovative and productive with less effort?
What can creators do to become more relevant in an age of automation?
How can people rehabilitate from losing their creativity in childhood?
What distinguishes human creativity from machine generativity?
How could we become comfortable with the creative process itself?
Our focus is on professionals being actively creative as part of their work, in particular but not limited to:
Musicians Writers Photographers Comedians Poets Chefs Painters Architects Designers ...
Through interviews, we're identifying the different factors, patterns, techniques, and metrics that are frequently used in creative processes.
- Repository of Knowledge: We use this repository as a place to store our findings about creativity.
- Ongoing Experiment: We'll leverage open-source platforms and social media to gather empirical data!
- Practical Focus: We'll turn all these insights into tools that can be easily used daily by practitioners.
- Individually Generated: We'll deliver the results and content in a way that's custom to each person.
We're just getting started, so feel free to jump in!
- Hypotheses — Establishing assumptions to validate, see this thread.
- Research — Collecting material (e.g. interviews) for further study.
- Analysis — Finding the underlying patterns in the data collected.
- Experiments — Setting up and running experiments to test assumptions.
- Documentation — Writing up the results and the patterns found.
- Assembly — Building tools to provide content as personal suggestions.
Project Banner — Dandelion field adapted from original photo under CC-BY-NC-SA @charlierapple.
- Petra Champandard-Pail
- Christopher Alexander
- Elizabeth Gilbert
- Sir Ken Robinson