The Creativity Project

Or so they say. The Creative Space search engine is like viewing images in OSX’s finder on the web. Looking for random images? There is are great repositories for free stock images at the Stock Exchange and many other nooks and crannies on the web. Go knock yourself out.

Being creative is more than letting people run wild with their ideas, as uncovered in an insightful interview with Brad Bird on Innovation lessons from Pixar, where the McKinsey Quarterly examined issues around creating a successful creative environment: The Quarterly: How important is team dynamics to innovation and creativity? Brad Bird: Making a film, you [...]

An insightful and entertaining reflection on our educations system from TedTalks, by Sir Ken Robinson, and the essential need for schools to learn how to promote creativity. Both the education system and the corporate work environment are not conducive for creativity, and that the structure favors following procedure and being right over the freedom to [...]

Check out the insight from Hivelogic into Offices and the Creativity Zone. Dan discusses some reasons why the corporate work environment isn’t the right setting to be creative – through countless distractions and pressures to produce results. Reminds me of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi… where too many demands coming from [...]

Recently, Lifehack.org posted 30 Tips to Rejuvenate Your Creativity submitted by their readers. Here are some of my favorites: 3. Expose yourself. Not after too much vodka. Expose yourself to new art – books, music, paintings – all the time. If you’re a rocker, listen to funk. If you’re a crime writer, read fantasy. If [...]

I just discovered a site called Jiibe which offers a free assessment of the type of culture you would like to work in. It also allows you to rate the company you work for… As a bonus, it shows you the closest matching companies, constantly refining the mix as you answer more questions. Apparently I [...]

Today I am in celebration over my sister (and her husband)’s new bouncing baby boy, Alexander Oscar Bamberg. And, in this ultimate act of creation, I have become an uncle without so much as lifting a finger – even though I am some 4,867 miles away. Now, that’s a miracle. Congratulations and best wishes to [...]

As part of “Do something you’ve always wanted to, but never got around to” month we held the first ever London Creativity Night tonight at the famous Garrison Public House. The evening was filled with brainstorming and idea generation, building on “sketch-your-ideas”, by introducing the SCAMPER technique: Substitute Combine Adapt Magnify / Modify Put to [...]

I had dinner last night with a friend who recently enrolled in a creativity course, and then I ate lunch today with a different friend who is also enrolled in the same course. That was enough for me to look into it, and now I’m enrolled in an “ideas workshop” through the Central Saint Martins [...]

Staples of creativity literature: Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius by Michael Michalko Creativity in Business by Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers Lateral Thinking by Edward De Bono Hot Spots by Lynda Gratton Do you have any recommendations for the list?