Increase The Odds Of Creativity
After years of podcast interviews with creative experts, reading countless books on the subject, and being in the idea business, I now believe that creativity is a changing variable. And that there are at least three different “kinds” of creativity each of which require slightly different creative skills, and each of which can be enhanced with different methods.
Understanding these three “kinds” of creativity, particularly within the context of marketing, and understanding how we can enhance our creative skills within each, I believe will increase the odds of creativity for everyone.
Steven Johnson, in his brilliant book, “Where Good Ideas Come From,” suggests that ideas are the result of collisions between existing ideas. I agree. And, interestingly, the three different kinds of creativity I am proposing below differ only in the nature of those collisions.A map of the ‘new media opportunity-space’ that I designed around 2001. This was one of many attempts to visualise this emerging ‘media-space’ – effectively the new artists ‘palette’ for content innovators.
Fictional ‘Imagineering’ is really important in this area– after all, it gave us the name ‘cyberspace’ itself, (back in 1983, an example of McLuhan’s observation that artists are cultural antennae, operating right on the frontiers of change. (“the artist … is always thought of as being way ahead of his time because he lives in the present”), Sci-fi writers and intellectuals have fed the imagination of digital artists and designers really since the Sixties – through the work of Herbert Marshall McLuhan, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, John Brunner, Alfred Bester, Kurt Vonnegut , Brian Aldiss, – and many others.
‘imagineering’ – creating the future by invention
One kind of ‘imagineering’ has punctuated the history of hypermedia: the multi-disciplinary teamwork of computer scientists and engineers. Examples such as Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Centre, the Atari Research Centre, Bell Labs, the Media Lab, Xerox PARC, the Viacom New Media Kitchen, the Apple New Technology Group, and recently, the Disney Studios spring readily to mind (let alone the hypermedia research at Brown University, and work in England at Middlesex, the RCA, Central St Martins, Martlesham and Cambridge PARC. Latterly the multiple disciplines included in these commercially-funded teams have been broadened to include cognitive psychologists, telecoms engineers, AI experts, games designers, and designers and practitioners from the wide range of media disciplines that are now converging in this digital domain.
These imagineering teams have been responsible for many of the big breakthroughs in human-computer interface, networking, and many other aspects of computing and digital media.
The Augmentation Centre gave us the Mouse, screen windows, e.mail, groupware and a working hypertext system. Atari – with Alan Kay, Brenda Laurel, Jaron Lanier and Thomas Zimmerman, gave us lots of games, Virtual Reality and the dataglove. The Media Lab produced a string of interesting developments including the first interactive video-disc: the Aspen Movie Map, Put That There, and all the technologies so well reported by Stewart Brand in the mid-80’s ( Stewart Brand: The Media Lab – Inventing the Future at MIT 1987)
. Look at Xerox PARC: – Alan Kay with the Dynabook idea, the GUI, and Smalltalk, Bob Metcalfe with Ethernet, Larry Tesler (who went on to project manage Newton and many other products, including Hypercard, at Apple), John Warnock of Adobe, many others.
Lately Michael Eisner has taken on this ‘imagineering’ mantle, creating Disney Imagineering Fellows – currently including Alan Kay, Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, Danny Hillis, as well as Jeff Katzenberg, George Lucas and others. Inventing the future is the best way to predict it.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” Alan Kay
inventing the future by imagination
The other visions are expressed in fiction and as a product of the critical analysis of our techno-culture, and the work of artists and architects. Herbert Marshall McLuhan remains the constantly most surprising for me – all this stuff he wrote in the Sixties still seems to be totally relevant now, and indeed, we now inhabit the global village of his imagination.
What is it: This is the most basic form of creativity in marketing, the “fender bender” of collisions, but needs to be at least acknowledged. Think of it as a “match maker” for two existing ideas. A local mechanic sponsors an auto show, for example. Sponsoring auto shows is nothing new but a mechanic sponsoring an auto show might be new to that particular local mechanic. Or a barber shop doing a live remote with a local radio station. Not a new concept, but might be new to that barber shop.
How can we improve the odds of this kind of collision: When a brand needs to get attention for itself, one time-tested way to do that is to sponsor an event that people attend. Not terribly creative, but it just might work. And the only way to know about such conventions is to be aware of them through years of experience. Media companies are particularly adept at this kind of creativity and have “automated” the creativity involved by building sophisticated tools to help identify the right channels for new marketing challenges. But enough years in the ad business and you develop a “gut” for such things and smart Conventional Collisions come quickly.The Cutty Sark’s figurehead from an angle calculated to save her blushes. However, I can confirm that her breasts are as startling as Chris Partridge suggests they should be (see comments below). Click on the photo to visit the Cutty Sark website
Despite all the potential conventional hazards of collisions, groundings, capsizes, sudden leaks, engine failures and the rest, they do say that boating is a fairly safe activity – or so I believed until I read a press release this morning from the Scottish Traditional Boat Festival.
Inexplicably, their release lists a long series of potential sources of boating danger I had never previously considered, and which I’ve never seen marked on any chart:
•Never step on board a ship with your left foot as superstition suggests this brings bad luck to your journey
•Avoid people with red hair when you are going to the ship to begin a journey. This bad luck can be averted if you speak to the red headed person before they speak to you
•Black travelling bags are considered bad luck for the seaman
•Throwing stones into the sea will cause great waves and storms
•Don’t look back once the vessel has left port, as this can bring bad luck
•The only person permitted to whistle on a boat is the captain. Superstition claims that whistling on a vessel causing the wind to blow; therefore the captain will only whistle if he requires a gust of wind
Certain precautions that can help however:
•A stolen piece of wood mortised into the keel of the ship will make the vessel sail faster
•Placing a silver coin in the mast-step of a boat will ensure a successful voyage
•For good luck when taking a long voyage, pour wine on the deck at the start of the journey
•In seafaring black cats are considered to be extremely lucky creatures and to bring good luck in bringing a sailor home from sea
•If a shoal of dolphins swim along side a ship, this is considered a sign of good luck
The implications of all this are clearly serious. For one thing, pre-trip sessions to plan trips and discuss safety will now have to be much longer, as even an afternoon sail will necessitate a protracted session with a laptop presenting a series of slides illustrating the dangers of black bags, looking the wrong way and careless whistling.
What is it: Now we’re talking some serious creativity because here the collision happens inside one’s own head using the “materials” already installed. Everything you have ever learned in your life is stored somewhere up there between your ears. And everything up there is entirely willing to collide with something else in there to create the endorphin rush of a new idea. Internal Collisions come to us while thinking, brooding and actually contemplating. Or they come to us after some time for incubation, when the subconscious has time to slam concepts together from the millions to choose from in your brain. The ideas that result from Internal Collisions lead to those “Aha!” moments that we all experience from time to time. They seem to come out of the blue, but nothing could be further from the truth. They come from recombinations of concepts within the confines of your own mind – facts, experiences, preferences, emotions, and everything else. Some believe the crazy randomness of dreaming at night is nature’s way of forcing seemingly disparate thoughts together in our minds.
One of the most famous and entertaining examples of Internal Collisions revolves around a Beatles song. Did you know that Paul McCartney woke up one day in the ’60s with the song, “Yesterday,” in his head? That’s right, he woke up, fell out of bed, and before he could drag a comb across his head, he had the melody in totality. Here’s Paul recalling that day.
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