Tag: shirky

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.

Shirky on Tools

On the tools side in particular he Shirky says:

“There is no such thing as a generically good tool; there are only tools good for particular jobs [but]when you improve the available tools, you expand the number of plausible promises in the world.”

and

“new tools are not always better. New tools, in fact, start with a huge social disadvantage, which is that most people don’t use them, and whenever you have a limited pool from which potential members can be drawn, you limit the social effects.”