Tag: creativity

Shirky on Creativity

Here’s a talk on creativity that Clay Shirky gave recently. In it he describes five student projects – from interface design to how people cluster to build new work – in order to speculate about the rules of creativity and understand how creative opportunities might be expanded.

Note: the following is a bit of a spoiler – notes-to-self about the six ‘rules’ of creativity that emerge from Shirky’s examples:

  1. Use interest as the design probe for projects
  2. Start with a technology in search of a problem
  3. combine things in new ways to make new things
  4. design for serendipity (included here is the nice idea that institutions need to know when to stop doing things that no longer work)
  5. encourage the use everything as raw material for developing things
  6. there are no rules for creativity

His definition of creativity?

‘Creativity is not a thing; it is the ability to produce valuable novelty’.

Valuable novelty depends on context: what is valuable novelty for you may not be such for me. But if you can find out what it is for you then you can maximise the opportunities to develop it.

The plagiarism spectrum

Plagiarism is a thorny issue at this time of year trapped beneath mountains of assignment, but I just wanted to note this graphic by Turnitin which suggests that there are twenty ways of creating unoriginal content not all of which are equally evil:

plagiarism

 

Whilst some of these categories work better than others, the language used  should enable a more stimulating discussion about creating stuff, originality and using others’ work in/as/though/with your own. The graphic above is a small section of a more extensive infographic which expands and gives practical examples which would probably work well in the classroom. I just wish they’d done separate .jpg files so that they would be easier to … use/copy/remix …

As Dali said:

Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing.

Crowd sourcing the book …

Is this the future of the book?

Brian Stelter is a New York journalist who is writing (has been commissioned to write?) a book about morning TV. Here he’s commissioning his twitter followers to come up with ideas for the content:

Brian Stelter  

Before I write 1 word of this book, I want feedback about what people really want to read. Tweet me or comment here:

5 hours ago via web

via twitter.com

I think this is happening more and more as the crowd usurps the individual in the Zeitgeist of web creativity. But isn’t it the original perspective of one writer that makes ‘authoring’ something more than mashing-up the more perspicacious offerings of the crown?

Everything is a Remix Part 3 on Vimeo

Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

“creativity isn’t magic: it happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials.

And the soil from which we grow our creations is something we scorn and misunderstand, even though it gives us so much… and that’s copying. Put simply, copying is how we learn. We can’t introduce anything new until we’re fluent in the language of our domain, and we do that through emulation.”

David Gauntlett – Participation Culture – Pt. 1

via youtube.com