How to Generate, Capture, Collect, and Realize Ideas Capturing, Collecting (Incl
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
O Bring more structure in your creativity: RGANIZING Organize it. ORGANIZING About this Book This book was written as a help for individual persons who want to organize their creativity, CREATIVITY be it for science (incl. engineering and commercial projects), art or private projects. Its aim is to enlarge your options when having ideas and to improve the chance of realizing creative projects. It is written as a practical handbook and describes how organization can support generating, How to generate, capture, collect, and realize ideas capturing, collecting (incl. enlarging, restructuring, etc.) and realizing ideas. to improve individual creativity. While creativity “techniques” are dealt with, the focus is on the infrastructure to enable you to capture your fleeting ideas and cultivate them to finally realize them as creative projects. Contents 1. About Creativity Definition, Misconceptions, Advantages & Disadvantages, Responsibility, Requirements for Creativity, and Helpful Skills C 2. Creativity and Organization Benefits of Organizing Creativity, Apparent Exceptions, Principles and Starting to Organize, and Organizing Yourself reativity 3. Generating Ideas The Creative Process, Hard Work & Time (I), Blocks, Techniques & Tactics, and Finding Problems 4. Capturing Ideas Reasons, Ways, Evaluating Capturing Methods, Quality of Tools, Missed Ideas, Specific Ways to Capture, Worst Cases, Nothing to Capture, Other People, and Scenarios 5. Collecting Ideas Reasons, Ways, Organizing the Idea Collection, Prioritizing, Evaluating Collection Methods, Ways of Collecting Ideas, Issues, Starting, Digitalizing Information, Expanding, Restructuring and Removing, and Protecting the Collection 6. Realizing Ideas Harvest, Selecting Ideas for Realization, Hard Work & Time (II), Process of Realizing Ideas, Organizational Helps, Problems in the Realization Phase, Feedback, Communicating Ideas, Worst Cases, and Best Case 7. Archiving Ideas Reasons, Ways, Problems, and Other Aspects 8. Final Remarks & Appendix Final Remarks, Contact Information, Links Index, and a Short History of this Book Organizing creativity is similar to keeping an orchard: you prepare the ground (acquire knowledge and skills), you plant (put captured ideas in the idea collection) and raise (add to, enlarge and restructure the ideas) your culture (projects). Finally when a Daniel Wessel project is ripe (has sufficient ideas) you can harvest it (realize the project) and enjoy the fruits of success. Organizing Creativity How to generate, capture, collect, and realize ideas to improve individual creativity. I would like to thank … … the muses who inspired me to write this book. … Keith Blount and his team for the “Scrivener” writing software. … the programmers of Circus Ponies Notebook and DokuWiki. … the organizers of the MinD-Akademie 2007. … the participants of my explorative survey about the organization of individual creativity. … all critics who gave me feedback to improve this work. … Tanja Gabriele Baudson for the interesting stimulations. … Eva Maria Reussner for her valuable feedback and for agreeing to be the hand model on the cover of this book. Thank you. © 2009 by Daniel Wessel. All rights reserved. Cover Image: Copyright by Daniel Wessel, 2008. I know that scanning a book and sharing it online makes it instantly available and is a nice way to promote oneself and to ‘help’ others, but please refrain from doing so. This book took me over a year and a half of my life to write, time I will not get back. While (essentially) stealing a book might be regarded as a compliment by some as a sign that my work is appreciated, I actually prefer money. If you got an illegal copy, please consider making a donation. You find my address at www.organizingcre- ativity.com or at www.ipsych.org. Cite as: Wessel, D. (2009). Organizing Creativity. To all muses, inspiring us. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Overview of the contents of this book 5 Disclaimers 6 About the Author 7 Sources 8 Aims of this book 9 Creativity 13 What is Creativity? 15 Misconceptions About Creativity 25 Advantages and Disadvantages of Creativity 32 Responsibility 36 What is needed to be creative? 40 What is not needed for creativity? 53 Helpful Skills 57 Creativity and Organization 59 Why Organize Creativity? 61 Creativity without Organization? 66 How to Organize Creativity 68 Starting to Organize Creativity 71 Organize Yourself 73 Generating Ideas 77 The Creative Process 79 A Case for Hard Work 81 A Case for Time 91 Blocks 97 Techniques and Tactics 98 Finding Problems 127 Table of Contents Capturing Ideas 129 Why capture ideas? 131 How to capture ideas 135 Evaluating an Idea Capturing Method 141 The quality of tools for capturing ideas 143 Missed Ideas 145 Ways to Capture Ideas 146 Worst Cases in Capturing Ideas 162 When you have nothing to capture 164 Capturing Hell is other people 166 Capturing Ideas Scenarios 168 Collecting Ideas 183 Why Collect Ideas? 185 How to collect ideas 187 Organizing the idea collection 197 Prioritize Projects 207 Remembering Central Projects via Landmines 210 Evaluating an Idea Collection 213 Ways of Collecting 222 Some Issues regarding the ways of collecting ideas 256 Starting an Idea Collection 257 Digitalizing Information 259 Finding Ideas 260 Expanding Ideas 261 Restructuring Ideas 262 Removing Ideas 264 Protecting your Idea Collection 265 Realizing Ideas 277 Harvest! 279 How to decide which idea to realize 280 viii Table of Contents A case for hard work (Part II) 285 A case for time (Part II) 288 How to realize ideas 290 Organizational Helps 297 Problems during the realization phase 299 Feedback 305 Communicating Ideas 328 Worst Cases 341 Success 359 Archiving Ideas 361 Why archive projects? 363 How to archive projects 364 Problems of Archives 367 Other Aspects of Archives 369 Final Remarks & Appendix 371 Final Remarks 373 Contact the Author 375 Link Index 377 ix Introduction We live in the Golden AGe of CreAtivity. People were probably always creative and used the countless opportunities that a day presents to follow their creative urges. But todays world has given us opportu- nities to be creative on a much larger and broader scale. Art Materials to do art, be it photography, painting, vid- When my daughter was eo or nearly everything else, have become available about seven years old, she asked me one day what and affordable for the average person. A canvas costs I did at work. I told her I less than 10 Euro. Digital photos cost almost noth- worked at the college - ing, blurring the line between amateurs and profes- that my job was to teach sionals. Courses for nearly any hobby are available people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, in most larger cities. If not, groups on every hobby and said, “You mean they and vast information resources can be found on the forget?” internet. The person of the year 2006 according to Howard Ikemoto Time magazine was … You. The user of the digital world, who has transformed from a mere consumer of information and entertainment to a producer. The digital world has given us the opportunity to become any kind of artist, be it a director, a writer, a publisher, a photographer or anything else. Open source tools are available that allow anyone, who is willing to learn how to use them, to create animated movies (e.g. Blender. org) or professionally edit images (e.g. GIMP). Writers can publish their own blogs or even books (e.g. via Lulu.com), without lectors and publishers, and much more. YouTube allows anyone to share their videos with the world. Even art that is done without any digital media benefits from the internet. Instructions are available for free, materials can be ordered from specialized shops around the world, and the products itself can be photographed, recorded, videotaped or scanned to be dis- played on flickr, YouTube, myspace or any other site to share it with the world. Science “Nothing shocks me. I’m a scientist.” The information available, through the internet and Indiana Jones bookstores, places current scientific research in the hands of any person who is interested in and will- ing to learn about it. Laymen, be it clinical patients or concerned environmental- ists, can and do learn about dangers to their health and environment and debate with experts. Open source tools like R (http://www.r-project.org) allow anyone to do their own statistical analysis. Amateur astronomers share information over the internet. Surveys and experiments can be done online. Instructions for scientific experiments can be found on the internet (e.g. http://www.brightscience.com), small computers are commercially available that can be equipped with different probes to gather environ- mental data (e.g. Nova 5000, http://www.nova1to1. “Wait a minute, Doc. Ah ... com), as are different materials and chemicals to ex- Are you telling me that you built a time machine ... out periment with. of a DeLorean?” “The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time ma- Engineering chine into a car, why not Power tools and workbenches can be found in many do it with some style?” Marty McFly and Dr. Emmett homes. In the past, some incredible inventions have Brown in “Back to the Future” originated in peoples garages, e.g. the Apple Com- (1985) 1 Introduction puter or the intermittent wipers. Recently 3D printers in fablabs became available that allow the creation of custom parts in small (even single) units, allowing the production of parts for inventions with were difficult to produce before. This al- lows people who want to build something to do so in independence from larger companies. Commercial projects “A reporter asked me not long ago whether I had While it is still very hard to be successful as an inven- ever expected a commer- tor, the heavy emphasis on computers have opened cial internet to operate. new avenues of ways in which people can earn mon- ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘that didn’t surprise me.