Creativity

Looking at man, [the author of Genesis] sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the “image” of God was modelled, we find only the single assertion, “God created”. The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.

The Design Squiggle is a simple illustration of the design process. The journey of researching, uncovering insights, generating creative concepts, iteration of prototypes and eventually concluding in one single designed solution. It is intended to convey the feeling of the journey. Beginning on the left with mess and uncertainty and ending on the right in a single point of focus: the design.

Interesting observation is that “solo-dev” seems to be the new indie.

...In this case, I think it’s great when things get brought back to the basics… Work by just one person counts as something. It brings value to the table in ways that work by large teams never will because it’s the unique voice, perspective, and intention of just one person that you are experiencing when you are playing their game. Experimentation can thrive here.

...It is particularly interesting when you look at the tool space. Tools outside of the mainstream, made by just one person, a group of friends, or a small team… all asking “what if”, and then exploring how their tool can empower creation in an idealistically creative way.

In other words, making a film (like making a website) is an iterative, evolutionary process. Many important motifs, themes, and meanings cannot be in the original draft because the people making it have not yet evolved their understanding to discover them. Only through the process of making these things can you uncover a new correspondence of meaning deeper and more resonant than anything in the original draft — which makes sense, given that the drafts themselves are not even developed in the medium of the final form, e.g. movies start as screenplays and websites as hand drawings or static mocks, both very different mediums than their final forms.

...the creative process is not an assembly line. Complications and in-process revisions are something to be embraced, not feared, because they are an inherent part of making.

If large groups are not ideal, what is the perfect group size? A fascinating 2019 study explored this question by looking at citation networks. They found that papers with more authors tend to receive more citations — large teams are good at developing a field. However, they found that the smallest teams — between one and three authors — were significantly more likely to publish disruptive results that could change the course of a field. So, in terms of sheer creativity, smaller groups seem to have an advantage.

With three or more people, group think and social dynamics kick in; there is an audience to impress. Thus, the ideal group may actually be of a minimal size: two. When working with just one other person, one must remain fully focused as the pair iteratively move the discussion forward. Two people who support each other's thinking can travel far in their thinking without getting distracted. With just one other person, it is also easier to be at ease and to enjoy the experience — to get into a state of 'flow'.

So the intention here was to have a conversation. We were going to choose an interesting person to ask interesting questions, and I would respond with interesting answers, and we would have an interesting piece of audio to listen to.

And the more I thought about it the less interesting that concept became.

The Apple co-founder and the super-producer share similar ideas regarding taste and creativity.

There was a fence with spaces you
Could look through if you wanted to.

An architect who saw this thing
Stood there one summer evening,

Took out the spaces with great care
And built a castle in the air.

The fence was utterly dumbfounded:
Each post stood with nothing round it.

A work in process of mapping the creative coding community around the world.

I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be.

Although Playdate's innards are all quite modern, the word "retro" gets thrown around a lot when describing it. Sure, it has a black and white screen and so on, but I think the most retro aspects are actually in its philosophy.

...It's difficult, uncomfortable, and much less convenient, but we don't have to just sit by and watch as 2 or 3 massive corporations consume each other and gradually become the sole arbiters of what you can and cannot do with technology.

So, at the risk of sounding trite: look forward, but study history. Have goofy ideas and don't measure their value exclusively in dollars. Never stop playing.

A few nights ago, I was looking at the moon and I thought, “I’d like to read a cultural history of the moon.” I googled, and there it was. My friend Matt said, “Ideally, that is exactly how one should find everything they read…and write.”

It’s really that simple. You find the books you want to read… and if you can’t find them, you write them.

So I'd like you to think about when was the last time you thought about something for an entire hour? Like nobody bothered you and you had an idea and you sat for an hour and thought about it. How about for a whole day? Does everybody remember the last time they sat and thought about something for a whole day? How about over a course of a month? You had something you were working on and obviously, not spending all the time every day when you started thinking for a month. Or a year? These are tremendously valuable moments if you get to have them at all. I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the ability to think about probably three different things for a year or more.

To start very generally, taste is a mode. It’s a manner of interpretation, expression, or action. Things don’t feel tasteful, they demonstrate taste. Someone’s home can be decorated tastefully. Someone can dress tastefully. The vibe cannot be tasteful. The experience cannot be tasteful.

It’s not that I advocate for no note-taking. I just strongly believe in keeping it as elementary as possible, such that the note-taking itself doesn’t become the thrust of the endeavor. Leonardo da Vinci kept all of his notes in one big book. If he liked something he put it down. This is known as a commonplace book, and it is about how detailed your note-taking system should be unless you plan on thinking more elaborately than Leonardo da Vinci. Taping a bunch of cryptic phrases to the walls is also acceptable, or keeping a shoebox full of striking phrases on a jumble of papers, as Eminem did.

In the middle of the 2000s, the designers at creative consultancy Landor installed Adobe Photoshop on their computers and started using it. General manager Antonio Marazza tells author David Sax:

“Overnight, the quality of their designs seemed to decline. After a few months of this, Landor’s Milan office gave all their designers Moleskine notebooks, and banned the use of Photoshop during the first week’s work on a project. The idea was to let their initial ideas freely blossom on paper, without the inherent bias of the software, before transferring them to the computer later for fine-tuning. It was so successful, this policy remains in place today.”

So much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.

How do artists and scientists work? The same.

Froebel’s Gifts were meant to be given in a particular order, growing more complex over time and teaching different lessons about shape, structure and perception along the way. A soft knitted ball could be given to a child just six weeks old, followed by a wooden ball and then a cube, illustrating similarities and differences in shapes and materials. Then kids would get a cylinder (which combines elements of both the ball and the cube) and it would blow their little minds. Some objects were pierced by strings or rods so kids could spin them and see how one shapes morphs into another when set into motion. Later came cubes made up of smaller cubes and other hybrids, showing children how parts relate to a whole through deconstruction and reassembly.

These perception-oriented “Gifts” would then give way to construction-oriented “Occupations.” Kids would be told to build things out of materials like paper, string, wire, or little sticks and peas that could be connected and stacked into structures.

Progress is an ongoing act of myth-making. Most of the time the true story is a mixed one. Things are lost. Others gained. A happy ending is when you come out ahead. A story full of setbacks is a tragedy.

It feels like we’re experiencing more setbacks than progress in software and tech at the moment.

...Between the obvious cycle triggered by the lay-offs and the generally inhospitable environment that the software industry has evolved into, it’s hard to feel excited or motivated by software development.

And we do need to feel motivated, at least in part. The word “passion” is almost always a red flag for any given industry, but software development is a creative business. You may all go around cosplaying engineers, but your average coder is about as close to being an engineer as a fan cosplaying as Hugh Laurie playing House is to being a medical doctor.

Software is a creative industry with more in common with media production industries than housebuilding.

As such, a baseline intrinsically-motivated curiosity about the form is one of the most powerful assets you can have when doing your job. It helps you solve problems and come up with new ideas.

The current cycle of decline and disinvestment in people makes that hard – probably next to impossible – but we can try to find our own ways forward where we can.

I’ve come to the conclusion that “enterprise web development” is just regular web development, only stripped of any joy or creativity or autonomy. It’s plugging a bunch of smart people into the matrix and forcing them to crank out widgets and move the little cards to the right.

In these structures, people are stripped of their humanity as they’re fed into the machine. It becomes “a developer resource is needed” rather than “Oh, Samantha would be a great fit for this project.” And the effect of all this on individuals is depressing. When people’s primary motivation is to move tickets over a column, their ability to be creative or serve a higher purpose are almost completely quashed. Interaction with other humans seems to be relegated to yelling at others to tell them they’re blocked.

Reading “AS PER THE REQUIREMENTS” in tickets makes me dry heave. How did such sterile, shitty language seep into my everyday work?

this metaphor feels so true to me because life, itself, is dependent on water as source. thus, creativity is a form of psychic water — sometimes materialized. these two truths I always knew.

but to extend the water-as-life and water-as-system metaphor to everything in our internet practice — is then to make even the act of sending a newsletter, or hitting “publish” on a post — contain the energy of that which is life-giving, essential, and sacred. in this model, everything is connected. I’ve decided that this is the way I want to be on the internet, and this is the kind of world I want to build.

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way.

Your first short story takes 10 days to write. The next one 5 days, the next one 2.5 days, the next one 1.25 days. Then 0.625 days, at which point you’re probably hitting raw typing speed limits. In practice, improvement curves have more of a staircase quality to them. Rather than fix the obvious next bottleneck of typing speed (who cares if it took you 3 hours instead of 6 to write a story; the marginal value of more speed is low at that point), you might level up and decide to (say) write stories with better developed characters. Or illustrations. So you’re back at 10 days, but on a new level.

This kind of improvement replaces quantitative improvement (optimization) with qualitative leveling up, or dimensionality increase. Each time you hit diminishing returns, you open up a new front. You’re never on the slow endzone of a learning curve. You self-disrupt before you get stuck.

The interesting thing is, this is not purely a function not of raw prowess or innate talent, but of imagination and taste.

This talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question "Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?"

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in your creative project is to pick a topic which is too big. Big topics often lead to small results, small topics foster great results.

And here is why: Your project is limited by the time and energy you have.

These are the boundaries of your project. If you pick a huge topic then there is not much room for your creative efforts. On the other hand, if you pick a small topic you have time and energy to make a great creative contribution.

Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?

A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.

And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.

And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?

Lying somewhere between a club and a loosely defined set of friends, the SMALL GROUP is a repeated theme in the lives of the successful. Benjamin Franklin had the Junto Club, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had The Inklings, Jobs and Wozniak had Homebrew.

Around a dozen members is the sweet spot of social motivation: small enough to know everyone, yet large enough that the group won’t collapse if one or two members’ enthusiasm wanes; small enough that you are not daunted by competing with the whole world, yet large enough that you still need to be on your toes to keep up.

Andrei Tarkovsky shot the Stalker 3 separate times in abandoned nuclear power plants in Russia across multiple decades. It ended up killing him.

Aaron: You know that story about how NASA spent millions of dollars developing this pen that writes in Zero G? And how Russia solved the problem?

Abe: Yeah, they used a pencil.

Aaron: Right, a normal wooden pencil... It just seems like Philip takes the NASA route almost every time.

The method for how you write is not that important. What’s important is having a point of view and doing the work.

I sit down every day, whether I’m feeling it or not, and write something down.

I see people talk about the apps they use to track their notes, methods for organization, strategies for productivity, tracking their habits and so on.  

But my writing process is haphazard and scattered.

I have a cork board with a bunch of index cards full of scribblings and bullet points.

When I’m on the go and ideas come to mind, I’ll tap them or dictate them onto a simple note-taking app.

This picture is mildly interesting because instead of immediately collapsing into one rut, your brain hangs suspended between a rabbit rut and a duck rut. We nod and call this Ambiguity. But unless you Sit Down And Think About It For Five Minutes, you’re not going to notice that it could be a hairdryer that has been split open, let alone an erotic BDSM picture of a clothespin attached to a female breast. Maybe if you caught it right out of the corner of your eye, without time to think, or if it was disguised by visual noise, you would notice one of the latter two immediately – at the cost of not being able to see the duck or rabbit.

There is a very valid ethics concern with such games that let players create in them. I do believe they benefit from that and it can easily become exploitative. In its most extreme form this is basically the worst of abusive storefronts, packaged in a playful creation context as a way to justify making things (for free) for the platform.

...I say all this to put into context that I am encouraged by projects like Mini Maker: Make a Thing, that exercise constraint in how the creative relationship between player and game is handled. I don’t feel like my goofy artistic efforts in it are monetized. I don’t even feel like the stakes are high, or that a community will judge what I create and expect a certain level of quality, or like I even need to share what I am making. I feel like I exist creatively in it because creating things is silly, and fun, and it progresses this silly little story all of it is part of. It’s back to that beautiful relationship a player has when creatively engaging with a fantasy space.

This rental property includes a canonical example of one of my all-time favorite styles of functional architecture: the writing shed.

...Writing sheds don’t make the specific cognitive act of writing easier...but these sheds do seem to improve many of the general factors that surround this act.

...When it comes to cognitive work more generally, psychological factors matter. Whether you’re writing a book, or crafting computer code, or solving a business problem, or analyzing noisy data, you’re attempting to coax sustained abstract focus from a human brain not necessarily evolved for such intensely symbolic processing.

In his course Being Productive: Simple Steps to Calm Focus, Kourosh Dini emphasises the importance of taking a moment to “be with” the work every day (or however frequently you need to tackle a project). “Being with” your work is to be fully present and intentional about that activity and doing nothing else.

This idea was inspired by Dini’s piano teacher, who encouraged him to sit at his piano and touch the keys every day. Even on the days that he felt he had no time or inclination to practice. Sometimes touching the keys would lead to a good practice session, even when he didn’t feel like it would before he actually gave it a go.

Just like Dini, I find that once I give the task my full attention and be present, the actual doing of it turns out to be much easier and more enjoyable than my mind had been expecting. As usual, the resistance to getting started is far more uncomfortable than actually doing the thing.

It’s very interesting, I think, to try and analyze how screenwriting fits in with editing. As a writer-director, I do a lot of editing on the page. I very much enjoy the technology we have with word processing. It’s technology that’s been around a long time. But I wrote my first screenplay on a manual typewriter, so to me it’s still a bit of an innovation.

I love overwriting and then editing the same way I edit the images and, indeed, the dialogue and stuff when we get in the edit suite. I think the relationship between the two is very interesting, because editing is a key feature of cinema that’s not shared in other media. Eisenstein, he summarized it, “Shot A plus Shot B gives you Thought C.”

Most AI images look like shit. AI “artists” are quick to lecture me that generative tools are improving every day and what they spit out won’t always look this way – I think that’s beside the point. What makes AI imagery so lousy isn’t the technology itself, but the cliché and superficial creative ambitions of those who use it. A video of a cyber-punk jellyfish or a collie in sunglasses on a skateboard generated by Open AI’s new video-to-text model Sora aren’t bad because the animals in them look unrealistic; they’re bad because they’re mind-numbingly stupid. AI image generation is essentially a truncated exercise in taste; a product of knowing which inputs and keywords to feed the image-mashup machine, and the eye to identify which outputs contain any semblance of artistry. All that is to say: AI itself can’t generate good taste for you.

One of my favorite definitions of “hacking” is the creative reuse of tools for new and unexpected purposes. Hacking is using your email account as a hard drive, using your bicycle seat to open a beer, using Minecraft’s red bricks to create a calculator in the game.

The opposite of hacking is marketing. Marketing tells you that this particular non-stick pan is the pan you’ll use to make omelettes, and you’ll do it in the morning dressed in fashionable clothing in a nice kitchen. It includes a photo and inspirational copywriting to drive this home. Marketing dictates a style, context, and purpose for even the most general-purpose products. This narrative needs to be specific so that you can readily imagine it: it’s you, in an Airbnb, laughing with friends.

I realized that — you know, that the mouse is antisocial. The GUI is antisocial. So what’s that mean? You have a problem to solve, and you solve it with the GUI. What do you have? A problem solved.

But when you solve it with a command line interface in a scripting environment, you have an artifact. And all of a sudden, that artifact can be shared with someone.

By the way, the way you did it can show cleverness. I’ve never seen anybody use a GUI in a clever way. Ever. There’s no cleverness to it. No, like, “Oh my god, you should see the way Adam clicked that mouse. Oh my god. Guys, guys, guys, guys, come on! Check it out: Adam’s going to click the button! Oh my god! That’s amazing!” It just doesn’t happen.

Taught that programming—or the worse "developing software"—is like a routine engineering activity, many find difficulty seeing writing as a model or even a metaphor for programming. Writing is creative, it is self-expression, it is art, which is to say it isn't a science and unlike science and engineering, it isn't a serious activity. Judgments like this, though, are easiest made by people who don't seriously engage in making both science and art. Art, engineering, and science are—in that order—part of a continuum of finding truth in the world and about ourselves.

Shawn Liu writes at Good Enough:

The next time you’re coming up with ideas, tell yourself, Forget about good ideas, let’s come up with a list of ten bad ideas. The dumber the better! I bet you’ll find that easy.

And once you loosen up your brain by coming up with ten bad ideas, some good ideas may follow.

That sums it up well. A fair part of why I write every day is because I regularly fall into this rut.

“No, this idea’s no good, that idea’s awful too,” I tell myself. Except now, because I’m writing every day, the dialogue doesn’t end there. There’s a prompt, “…but I have got to publish something today, so I guess it’ll be this bad one.”

More often than not, I find that my initial assessment wasn’t accurate; the idea wasn’t bad at all. It just needed a bit more thought, a bit more energy. And a better one usually comes by the time I press publish.

Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.

Rather than having a few powerful web components, I like having lots of simple web components. The power comes with how they’re combined. Like Unix pipes.

I feel the same way about design systems. In my experience, the design systems that encourage mixing and matching different combinations are the ones that actually get used.

The design systems that struggle with adoption often have the best of intentions. “Look, there are all these pre-made components for you—you should just use them!” But that can be very disempowering. Where’s the sense of agency in using a pre-made solution?

...Colours, spacing, type; these are all building blocks that a designer can compose with. But it gets murkier after that. Pre-made form fields? Sure. Pre-made forms? No thank you!

It’s like there’s a line where a design system crosses over from being a useful toolkit into being a bureaucratic hurdle to overcome. When you hear a designer complaining that a design system is stifling their creativity, I bet it’s because that line has been crossed.

I sometimes like to use the term "weave the web" to describe people who publish on their personal website. While web-themed, "weave the web" speaks only to one aspect of the web: its interconnectivity. Internet gardening evokes thoughts of the other side of the web: where you are on your own land, cultivating the thoughts on your mind. Letting ideas grow.

In doing creative work, do not start your day with addictive time-vampires such as The New York Times, email, and Twitter. All scatter the eye, and mind, produce diverting vague anxiety, clutter short-term memory. Instead, begin with your work. Many creative workers have independently discovered this principle.

I'm a super fast typist, and I can spew out things on a computer screen almost as fast as I normally talk.  It's easy as abc.  When I do so, however, I'm not thinking, I'm just gurgitating.

Currently, psychiatrists and neuroscientists have been studying exactly what happens in the brain when a person writes letters and words by hand.  What they are finding is that this neuromuscular activity stimulates creativity.

...When I contemplate what the essential difference between handwriting and typing is for creative thought, it seems that the former forces you to ponder, to slow down, to draw deep connections, to reflect, while the latter invites you to let verbiage flow freely.

...Here on Language Log, we have often discussed the relative benefits of cursive vs. printing. That, I believe, is largely a matter of esthetic preference. More important is the dichotomy between handwriting (whether cursive or printing) and typing. It would be an educational and cultural tragedy if we simply let learners tap out their messages on a keyboard before they have become intimately familiar with the cognitive power of writing by hand.

I think a lot of people who work in innovation get frustrated. Frustrated that their ideas don’t get absorbed by the main business. Frustrated that their prototypes don’t get funding. Frustrated that their ideas aren’t heard.

The further you are from the core business the more freedom you have, but at the expense of influence. The closer you are to the core business the less freedom and creativity you have, but the more influence you have. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

...The funny thing is that a lot of innovation projects “fail” - they don’t get funding or don’t get built - but some part of the innovation work eventually bleeds out into the world. Sometimes it’s as small as a logo, or a name. Sometimes it’s a unique interaction pattern. Or sometimes the innovation is swallowed whole, consumed and only years later emerges on the product roadmap. Imperceptible, the impact of the innovation work only visible to the team that worked on it.

A lot of innovation work only fails if you measure it the wrong way.

I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s.

An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!

It’s as if we’ve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonald’s Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.

Develop Your Own Taste
Non-Obvious Ideas Take a Long Time to Win
Structure and Constraints Breed Creativity
Listen and Observe
Creativity Requires Different Speeds
The Best Want to Work with The Best
Getting Full Creative Control
Create Your Own Luck

Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus.

Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.

The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest.

...It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

Your vision takes off.

Vintage models blended in, new ones stand out.

When photography pioneers used Leicas, the cameras weighed 200-300g—perfect for discreet shooting. Modern Leicas tip the scales at over 700g and cost around $10,000. Hardly inconspicuous under any aspect.

This reminds me of how Apple stopped making the iPhone mini and now sells bulkier, pricier models. Leica's rangefinder cameras have also forgotten their original goals.

...Leicas take beautiful photos, but a heavy status symbol seems at odds with the heritage of street shooting candid shots. Like you don't need a Pro phone to be a professional at anything except doomscrolling, or like Hemingway didn't write his novels with a Mont Blanc, you also don't need a Leica to take great pictures. Especially now, especially for street photography.

That's what many brands now do: they sell you a status symbol, but not the ability to have fun and get better at a craft.

Coming up with entirely novel ideas is really, really hard.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing but can exhibit biases and may generate toxic content. While alignment techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) reduce these issues, their impact on creativity, defined as syntactic and semantic diversity, remains unexplored. We investigate the unintended consequences of RLHF on the creativity of LLMs through three experiments focusing on the Llama-2 series. Our findings reveal that aligned models exhibit lower entropy in token predictions, form distinct clusters in the embedding space, and gravitate towards "attractor states", indicating limited output diversity. Our findings have significant implications for marketers who rely on LLMs for creative tasks such as copywriting, ad creation, and customer persona generation. The trade-off between consistency and creativity in aligned models should be carefully considered when selecting the appropriate model for a given application. We also discuss the importance of prompt engineering in harnessing the creative potential of base models.

A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to clearly hear a lyric, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.

American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, writing that as a girl, when her mother read to her from Percy's Reliques, she had misheard the lyric "layd him on the green" in the fourth line of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" as "Lady Mondegreen".

The [Silmarils] are good; their making was at least potentially innocent; but afterward arose a lust for owning and controlling that led to great tragedy… The aspect of humanity which the elves represent most fully – both for good and ill – is the creative one.”

And this is why “making” in and of itself is not the answer to our decadent moment. “Love of things, especially artificial things, could be seen as the besetting sin of modern civilisation, and in a way a new one, not quite Avarice and not quite Pride, but somehow attached to both” – and this is the Fëanor Temptation. It is in light of this temptation that I advocate repair, which is a mode of caring for what we have not made, but rather what we have inherited. We will not be saved by the making of artifacts — or from the repair of them, either; but the imperative of repair has these salutary effects: it reminds us of our debt to those who came before us and of the fragility of human constructs.

Imagine you bake a delicious peach pie over the weekend, and you offer a slice to your friend. They respond:

“Wait, how is this different from every other peach pie that’s ever been baked? It seems really similar to another pie I had recently.”

This is obviously an absurd reaction!

But this exact dynamic happens all the time in creative software projects. Someone shares a project they made, and the first reaction is: how’s it different?

The problem here is a mismatch in values.

The friend has assumed that your goal is to “efficiently” reach the goal of a delicious pie, or perhaps even to create a new kind of pie. But that’s not the goal at all!

Baking a pie is a creative act. It’s personal, it’s inherently delightful, it’s an act of caring for others. It’s also a craft that one can improve at over time. Just buying the “best” pie would defeat the point.

Professionalism is a lie, build what you love, explore everything. In today’s age of creation, anyone who attempts to tell you otherwise is lying. You’ll end up seeking what you traded for the rest of your life.

It feels like our culture’s impulse is to wring every last cent possible out of any creative endeavor — or at least leave open the possibility for more from the outset.

So when I read Manu’s post the other day, it really resonated.

...I like this idea of beginning to notice and bring attention to people or creative works that intentionally bring closure, even when you’re left wanting a little more.

...I think this goes for lots of creative endeavors, including software. There’s an art to knowing when — and how — to bring something to an end.

Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do.

Important connections are often made by accident, outside the bounds of our research agenda.

To the observer, this may seem like a very unordered and untidy system; however, we should not confuse order and tidiness. Tidiness separates species and creates work, whereas order integrates, reducing work and discouraging insect attack. European gardens, often extraordinarily tidy, result in functional disorder and low yield. Creativity is seldom tidy.

Perhaps we could say that tidiness is something that happens when compulsive activity replaces thoughtful creativity.

If you want to produce the music of the future, ponder the music of the past, then do the opposite.

Creativity gurus have termed this approach looking for the “worst possible idea”. When looking for a business breakthrough, a design innovation or a flash of artistic insight, it can be hard to think of much when challenged to dream up a good idea. Far easier, less intimidating and more fun to write down a list of terrible ideas, then see what those terrible ideas suggest once you turn them on their heads.

Sometimes the worst-idea exercise is little more than a warm-up, getting the imaginative sparks flying before the real creative work begins. Sometimes, however, focusing on what makes an idea bad shines the spotlight on what might make an idea good. If the bad idea is to make a product look clumsy and ugly, that suggests it’s worth paying more attention to the product’s elegance and beauty. If the bad idea is to ship the product with bewildering instructions, the good idea is to hire an editor to hone the instructions.

Even more intriguing is when the bad idea is actually a great idea. Imagine a “worst possible idea” brainstorm for a restaurant. What if the waiters in your restaurant were rude to the customers? Bad idea. Except that was the signature method of Wong Kei’s, located in London’s Chinatown, and the sheer drama of it made Wong Kei’s a popular destination for decades.

All the first antecedents of man's devices were given him by Nature. Every one of his devices is traceable back to something in nature which suggested the first remote and primitive beginnings of its evolution. And every feature in art that man's mind conceived is conceived by a mind that has evolved as a part of nature: that grew out of nature.

The evolution of devices is as much a natural process as the evolution of organisms.

In System A, there is no architect separate from the contractor. We are builders, simply. As builders, we have a direct feeling about construction. We feel it in our fingers, so it is down to earth. One result of this down-to-earth quality is that everything is somewhat experimental. We make experiments all the time. Sometimes we place a piece of wood this way. Another time, we may like to try it that way. Any time something new comes up in the design of a building, we are very likely to try and invent the best way of building it. This is not a great big invention. Just a simple invention, the way we might invent a way of tying a piece of string, to hold a broken toy together. It is just practical.

"The process in creating that kind of canvas was like—what?—10 percent action and 90 percent ass scratching. First you prepared yourself, cleaning up and arranging your palette and tools, sweeping the floors, and then finally, when you were ready, you faced the empty white expanse of white canvas and made your first stroke."

The coining of scientific names for newly described species is one of the most creative acts in science…Scientific naming is a clear example of how science and scientists are socially situated, and how culturally influenced decisions such as what to name a new species can affect both public perception of science and the conduct of science itself.

The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well - the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.

A lot of people think dreams and drugs involve some magical inspiration. I think otherwise.

I rarely get inspired by dreams or drugs, but I have my own secret source of inspiration: mishearing other people. Somebody says something, I misinterpret it, and the misinterpretation is quite interesting – more interesting than anything I would have come up with on my own if asked to generate an interesting idea. Maybe it’s a clever joke or turn of phrase. Maybe it’s a neat idea. Sometimes I misunderstand people’s entire positions, and end up with positions much more interesting than the ones they were trying to push.

a website with a thermostat
a website that floats in through the window
a website that is often partially shaded
a website that isn't sorry
a website with a courtyard

The most important undertaking of my day is to simply sit down at my desk and pick up my pen. Without this elementary act I could not call myself a songwriter, because songs come to me in intimations too slight to be perceived, unless I am primed and ready to receive them. They come not with a fanfare, but in whispers, and they come only when I am at work.

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures….

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

Human society is almost entirely about people clawing their way to a position where they can be The Guy and do The Thing....and, once there, hastily fill in with canned fodder and expedient sketches. The actual substance is mere afterthought.

While I can't distill this point any further, I can cite a favorite pithy observation for the umpteenth time:

Most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing.

Politicians don't give The Speech out of a desire to inspire and lead. It's the antithesis: they become politicians because they want to be the guy giving The Speech. If they were devoted to acting authentically and sincerely, rather than peering at themselves on their mental movie screen, they'd speak in order to say things, rather than vice versa. It's flabbergastingly rare that people give speeches to earnestly say things, even though that's the only way to draw a visceral response. If you're the least bit earnest - if you care about the doing and not just the posing, you might find yourself offering something fresh and spontaneous; something optimized for that unique moment. You may even change the nature of The Speech for all who come after (once it's stale, having been imitated to death and fully merged into society's unconscious).

The creator economy may seem like a tempting path to success for aspiring creators. We lift up success stories as though they're case studies, and we spread this idea that a million dollar career is one viral piece of content away.

But the creator economy is, to be frank, a dead end, a gilded cage that places a ceiling on what you can achieve.

What's the alternative?

Is there an alternative?

I like to talk about the DIY economy. The indie economy.

The way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy.

The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this:

“Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.”

Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us?

Propinquity, the state of being close to someone or something; proximity.

The law of propinquity states that the greater physical (or psychological) proximity between people, the greater the chance that they will form friendships or romantic relationships.

...It seems almost old fashioned to be talking about office design in 2024, but it would negligent to not consider these studies when we talk about team dynamics and communication.

The binary nature of the Remote Working Vs Return To The Office debate often dodges the issue about the vital role of communication when it comes to the spread of ideas and innovation.

...If you are doing solid repeatable work, or work that requires intense solo concentration, you can work from pretty much anywhere.

If you are in a discovery phase of work, and trying to fuse ideas together from multiple viewpoints remote working might be a hindrance.

Don’t play it like the flute. Play it as if it was the wind whistling through the desert dunes.

No matter what you love to create, there is something to be learned from the way Hans Zimmer approached the Dune score. We are all striving to create work that is novel, innovative, memorable, and inspiring. To get there, however, we tend to focus on getting things right, on avoiding mistakes, on “being professional”. Yes, it is important to have the commitment, dedication, and attention to detail of a professional. But being right? That will only take you so far. What is much more important is to approach the problem in front of you with curiosity and an open mind. With an urge to explore what can be found beyond the ordinary, beyond the right way of doing things. If you want to create something that nobody has come up with yet, it is important that you try out all the crazy ideas others are afraid to try, that you build prototypes, improvise, and freely play with the materials and the technologies you have at hand.

There are two modes of learning, two paths to improvement. One is to relentlessly, deliberately improve what you can do already, by trying to perfect your process. Focus on optimizing what works. The other way is to create new areas that can be exploited and perfected. Explore regions that are suboptimal with a hope you can make them work – and sometimes they will – giving you new territory to work in. Most attempts to get better are a mix of these methods, but in their extremes these two functions – exploit and explore – operate in different ways, and require different strategies.

You can’t second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like. It won’t be good. We’re not smart enough to know what someone else will like. To make something and say, ‘well, I don’t really like it but I think this group of people will like it’, I think [that approach] is a bad way to play the game of music or art. Do what’s personal to you, take it as far you can go. Really push the boundaries and people will resonate with it if they are supposed to resonate with it. But you can’t get there the other way. The other way is a dead-end path.

Deleuze and Guattari discovered a way of working that was “like two streams coming together to make a third stream.” Sciamma’s process achieves something similar, I think, through this clever use of dueling lists.

Effective writing stems from intelligently connecting the dots between the concepts you understand and can articulate. It stands to reason, then, that in order to generate more creativity you must not only add to a knowledge base, but deepen and expand the number of connections within the totality of the network. By establishing and explicitly mapping your knowledge, you allow yourself the freedom to remix information. You will often find that solutions come from previously unsuspected fields or topics—proving to be analogous in some shape or form.

Just as most jobs are harder than people think, most things in life are nowhere near as generic as people think. I feel it a lot at work. Why would we build “another” data management system when Excel and Airtable exist? Why would someone write “another” novel when so many have been written? We keep making stuff because we want to contextualize and internalize what’s happened. If AI changes everything, then we’ll end up making more stuff as humans in order to figure out what AI means. Rich likes to say “software is an op-ed” and I think that’s right—we make stuff because we have opinions and we want to share them. So: News of your obsolescence is greatly exaggerated. Keep doing that last 20%. We need it!

And essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden.  One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life.

What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.

The reason is that you very quickly can understand what you can do with an electric guitar or a violin or a set of drums and you stop looking for more options and you start grappling with it.

The problem with software-based work is that you never know what it does. You can never exhaust what it does. So you can always cover the fact that you haven't got an idea by trying another option. If you have a lot of options, you don't usually have a lot of rapport with the instrument. If you have a few options, your rapport keeps increasing because you understand the options better and better. And this is why people still make good music with crude instruments and simple instruments. Because they understand them better than our software.

"If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year."

To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half hour a day.

The series of photos of the 1959 model ends or stops with the photograph in which Kiesler triumphantly shows us the shell of his house like the remains of a creature taken from the seabed, a kind of Moby Dick harpooned and finally captured after the obsessive pursuit of a project that has taken up ten years of the life of the architect.

"I think that everybody has only one basic creative idea and no matter how he is driven off, you will find that he always comes back to it until he has a chance to prove it in purity, or die with the idea unrealized." — Frederick Kiesler

The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long."

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.

In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

I’ve seen that A/B test run time and again over the past twenty years with employees. The ones who are able to judo seemingly boring problems into interesting pursuits always end ahead on creativity and competence, and have more of it left over at the end of the day.

And a few years later, the person who discharged all their creativity against even the most trivial problems has grown their intellectual granary manyfold over the one who kept holding back.

As you sow, so shall you reap.

If we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe, we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being. If so, it is a serious matter, since we have seen already the unhappy results of handling any material in a way that runs counter to the natural law of its structure.

Naturally, practice is not preceded but followed by theory.
Such study promotes a more lasting teaching and learning
through experience. Its aim is development of creativeness
realized in discovery and invention – the criteria of creativity,
or flexibility, being imagination and fantasy. Altogether
it promotes “thinking in situations,” a new educational concept
unfortunately little known and less cultivated, so far.

If the mind needs to wander, best let the body do the same. A short walk is more effective in coming up with an idea than pouring all the coffee in the world down your gullet.

Artists are only creative for 10 years...we engineers are no different. Live your 10 years to the full.

Design is not about learning to think outside the box, it’s about finding the right box to think inside of.

An exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the genius of Japan's foremost living film director, Hayao Miyazaki — creator of some of the world's most iconic and enduring anime feature films.

For Plato and many medieval philosophers, imagination was construed primarily as a mimetic act of mirroring, representing, copying. This approach was often associated with deceit and illusion, with confounding original realities with secondary substitutes. By contrast, for Kant and the romantics—including German idealists and existentialists like Sartre—imagination was hailed as a productive force in its own right, the source of all true meaning and value.

Bachelard resisted both extremes. For him, imagination was at once receptive and creative—an acoustic of listening and an art of participation. The two functions, passive and active, were inseparable. The world itself dreams, he said, and we help give it voice.

It might be said that the carving of a woodblock encompasses the greatest restriction on freedom. Printmakers come under extraordinary natural constraints on their work. Strangely enough, however, it is this restriction that is the fount of beauty. Constraint and restriction themselves become a blessing.

...Many people see a lack of freedom as the death knell of art. That may be true in the case of the fine arts, but in the handicrafts, lack of freedom is the fountainhead of beauty.

It is the scale of human experience, from which thought and imagination take off, and to which they must return.

The final architectural embellishments for the neighborhood should be the most exceptional, a kind of punctuation by relief, the last bursts of creative potential as the scene shifts.

A true revelation, it seems to me, will emerge only from stubborn concentration on a solitary problem. I am not in league with inventors or adventurous, nor with travelers to exotic destinations. The surest - also the quickest - way to awake the sense of wonder in ourselves is to look intently, undeterred, at a single object. Suddenly, miraculously, it will reveal itself as something we have never seen before.

To be creative, you gotta feel like you're getting away with something.

The meat of Stalker, it replicates to me the middle, the feeling of the middle part of any creative project, where you're slowly putting one foot in front of the other, hoping that things work, trying to find your way, but you're not fully convinced that you're actually fucking doing it, and you feel like you're going in circles.

And so the meat of Stalker is these three characters, writer, the professor and the stalker, lost in these woods called the Zone. They have to break in there, which to me is like, it's replicative of the creative process of finding a way to break into an industry, or finding a way to break through writer's block, or it's this, you know, pure allegory, right?

For those who read and listen much more than they speak (guilty), an overly-strict Prune filter is applied to their writing; when these people go to write something of their own, their minds don’t produce thoughts nearly as “coherent, witty or wise as their hyper-developed Prune filter is used to processing”.

Hence, my dilemma and an opportunity to break out of this trap. I recognised that if I attempted to write at the quality I was used to reading at, first time every time, my brain would promptly grind to a halt—like trying to brainstorm with a group that laughs at your suggestions.

Your output depends on your input, but a lot of your input is random: you’re interested in lots of different things, and those things, occasionally, will talk to each other in your work.

Lately I’ve been thinking about being more intentional with input. Thinking about input as collage. Taking the principle of juxtaposition (1+1=3) and using that to guide your input: what weird, seemingly disparate things can you feed your brain that will come out later in a new mix?

The input collage can be subject or genre based and even better if it’s multi-media.

...There’s a balance here between feeding your brain intentionally and then backing off and letting your brain do the subconscious work of mixing your inputs together.

Memory and fantasy are related, as are recollection and imagination; one who cannot remember also cannot imagine, as memory is the very soil of imagination.

125. That there is a big danger in working in a single medium. The logjam you don’t even know you’re stuck in will be broken by a shift in representation.

New ideas would come about by a connexion and transferring of the observations of one Arte, to the uses of another, when the experience of several misteries shall fall under consideration of one mans minde.

The creator’s love for his work is not a greedy possessiveness; he never desires to subdue his work to himself but always to subdue himself to his work. The more genuinely creative he is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself.

The working style is based on periods of intense activity, coupled with other periods of more relaxed, reflective contemplation. This working style may not be a reflection of a particular personality trait, but a necessary aspect of creative work, which requires alternating intense effort with relaxation.

“The more exact and complete the criteria are, the more creative the work becomes. The creative act is reduced to an act of selection.”

— Karl Gerstner, Designing Programmes (1963)

I am pleading for the abolition of the word “use”, and for the freeing of the human spirit. To be sure, we shall thus free some harmless cranks. To be sure, we shall thus waste some precious dollars. But what is infinitely more important is that we shall be striking the shackles off the human mind and setting it free for the adventures which in our own day have, on the one hand, taken Hale and Rutherford and Einstein and their peers millions upon millions of miles into the uttermost realms of space and, on the other, loosed the boundless energy imprisoned in the atom.

The subject of this book is not typographic solitude, but the old, well-traveled roads at the core of the tradition: paths that each of us is free to follow or not, and to enter and leave when we choose – if only we know the paths are there and have a sense of where they lead. That freedom is denied us if the tradition is concealed or left for dead. Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown.

If you use this book as a guide, by all means leave the road when you wish. That is precisely the use of a road: to reach individually chosen points of departure. By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.