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#13. Idea Catalogue: Idea Blender
Blenders are magical machines of delicious goodness. Put some boring-tasting fruits and veggies in and out comes a delicious smoothie (unless if there’s wheatgrass in the mix). What if… you could do the same with your ideas? With the idea blender, one could take some boring, tired ideas (perhaps from…
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#12. Idea Catalogue: Breaking Boundaries
Frequently, my flow in thought becomes interrupted or hampered by boundaries, and the ability to see and navigate all the information I’ve collected all at once. Post-it notes are handy, but at some point you run out of wall space/post it notes/butcher paper space (but maybe not if you live in a giant house).…
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#11. Lit Review: Explaining Creativity
In Explaining Creativity, author and professor R. Keith Sawyer gives a comprehensive overview of the psychological research done on creativity so far. Though he touches topics such as the history of creativity research to research on creativity in various domains such as art and science, one of the most valuable…
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#10. Lit Review: Smart Thinking
In Smart Thinking, psychologist Art Markman presents a three-part formula for helping people solve problems more creatively. The strategies are grounded in recent literature from psychology and cognitive science on motivation, learning, perception, and memory. Early on, he draws a distinction between intelligence and what he calls “smart thinking”. Intelligence…
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#9. Idea Catalogue: Idea Garden
Inspired by my friend Siri’s very excellent idea of posting an idea-a-day to her tumblr blog on the future of banking, I’ve decided to just go ahead and start posting up the random crazy ideas I have while working on this project, even though I’m still analyzing my data and…
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#8. Lit Review: You Creative Brain
I recently finished Shelley Carson’s book on the neural bases of creativity, and it was a pretty interesting read. Carson is a psychology professor at the Harvard Extension School and has been conducting research on creativity for many years. In Your Creative Brain, Carson’s main thesis of book is that everyone…
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#7. Lit Review: Conceptual Blockbusting
In Conceptual Blockbusting, author James L. Adams discusses various kinds of blocks that impede our ability to “conceptualize” of problems and solve them in a creative way. He believes it’s important to understand these kinds of blocks that act as impediments to our thinking because we can then begin to be more deliberate about overcoming them–that…
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#6. Lit Review Map (So Far)
One of the things that I’m also juggling in the midst of conducting interviews and now analyzing my data is making sure I’m familiarizing myself with the literature. Like in my previous post, I mentioned that I was using Mindjet’s MindManager 9 to map out what I’m learning from my reading…
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#5. Elizabeth Gilbert on Nurturing Creativity
Today I listened to a radio show that I’d stumbled upon while searching for perspectives on “the creative process” in Google. The radio show is called TED Radio Hour, and it’s jointly produced by NPR. The topic of the show was The Creative Process, and what was particularly interesting was…
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#4. Analysis: The Tangled Thicket
Currently, I’ve done about two dozen interviews with people from various fields. It’s all been super interesting. Although I’d love to interview more types of people from various backgrounds (most everyone I’ve talked to has such interesting stories about what they’re working on), I’m reaching a point where my head feels…