iPod mini hacked from microdrive to flash – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

iPod mini hacked from microdrive to flash – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

multi touch desktop gui

This is fantastic. Created by Jeff Han, this could prove to be the desktop of the future.

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multi touch desktop gui

jeff’s famous pizza

How far would you go to get the perfect pizza? Jeff Varanso is a pizza perfectionist.He  worked on this recipe for six years. He even modified his oven to get the right temperatures necessary to cook the crust to the right level of charring.

Pizza Recipe

Where most of us would be happy with just a nice pizza, Jeff wanted to re-create the taste of Patsy’s on 117th Street in NYC. He details his recipe and the techniques needed to produce the right crust, which included modifying his electric oven to make it go into the cleaning mode. This allows him to cook at much higher temperatures than would be possible in an unmodified oven. At 825F the pizza above cooked in about 2 minutes and 10 seconds! 

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creativity exercises

I have found that fostering or maintaining creativity is quite difficult, but can be kickstarted by a series of exercises. These can range from simple observation exercises designed to make to look at your environment in a new way, to more complex assignments that really stretch you. A good start, as I mentioned the other day, is to go outside, lie back and just take a few minutes, ten minutes, looking at the clouds. Just observe, and see if you can see any shapes forming. Of course, if its raining where you are that’s not a lot of help! To help that here is an alternative for today.

We all know the basic shapes, such as the triangle, square, pentagon etc. What I want you to do is try to find those shapes in your day. Indoors or outdoors, it doesnt matter (not on the television!) but try to find them, big or small. Keep your eye out throughout the day for a triangle, square (easy!), rectangle, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon (or septagon) and an octagon. You can either just spot them, or photograph them, or draw them if you want! Its the looking that’s the important part.
Using these techniques seems easy, and they are! But what they do is increase your capacity to observe, to think, and to make associations. The element of chance is introduced, which is vital for creativity, and if nothing else gets you out of the house and getting some fresh air.

Fort Jefferson

creativity

Creativity (or creativeness) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness. An alternative, more everyday conception of creativity is that it is simply the act of making something new.

Creativity – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is how Wikipedia, the new benchmark, defines creativity. Wiktionary (the dictionary part) defines it clearer:

Noun

Singular creativity

Plural creativities

creativity (plural creativities)

1. The quality or ability to create or invent something; originality.

Clearly this is a start for our journey into creativity, but we must not allow ourselves to be bound by these definitions, accurate as they are. We all know what creativity is, or if we don’t, we have a vague idea of what it is when we see it. I want to explore creativity. How do you get it? Where can you see it in action? Can it be learned? Tied to creativity is innovation, the two are often intertwined but are different. If creativity is the production of new ideas, then innovation is the process of production and implementation of new ideas. Innovation is a process of using creativity to produce something useful. Creativity is part of that process, its the start bit, in my opinion a very important bit.

Creativity has dogged scientists who have wished to measure creativity and categorise its different elements. That’s not a failing of science, just an understanding of the depth and breadth of the problem for anybody wishing to put a measure against it. I dont want to do that here, as I have neither the scientific rigor or training (or time..or interest) to do so. What I want to do is explore and highlight creativity and innovation, and hopefully in doing so we will learn what it is, and how to foster it for our benefit. I am also hoping that this will be a journey for others as well.

As a society we have invested a lot of time and money and effort in technology to manage information. Information was seen as the driving force behind a lot of the innovation over the last twenty years. But we have many problems that now beset us, and information isnt going to help us, no matter how much you have and how fast you can sling it about the world. No, innovative solutions are the only way out, and to do that we are going to need a lot more creativity, from ourselves and the generation following us. We need to teach creativity to our children, in schools, in colleges and Universities. We need to make ourselves more creative. The answer to the problems might lay with you – in fact they do lie with you, and me. We just havent realised it yet.

technorati tags:creativity, learning, innovation

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blue skies

Blue skies. A symbol of things to come and of fresh starts. Who hasn’t laid on their back in the sand and watched as the clouds raced by, forming and re-forming shapes in the sky. That ability, to create shapes out of water vapour, is built in to us. The ability to see patterns where there might not be any. That is our creativity at work. Our own built-in creativity. Everybody has it, especially when young. Everybody has it built-in.

People often complain to me that they are not creative, that they couldnt possibly be an artist, or a designer, or someone who writes code. I say they are creative, they just dont develop it enough. Every time you make a decision, you are actually making a creative choice. It might not seem so, as most people often decide these things unconsciously. What we need to do is wake people up so that they can make conscious decisions.

I am going to re-align this blog so that I can concentrate on the creative processes that people make, and talk about them in some detail. I think that for the last ten months that the website has been heading that way anyway, so it’s not much of a change. Just a few tweaks here and there. I want to look at how the creative process starts, how people decide what to do and when. We will concentrate on the arts but also continue to look at new technologies, as they are very important. But what I dont want to be is a list of the new gadgets coming out and how cool they are etc. I think that is already covered adequately elsewhere (engadget). I dont want to be a list of cool arts stuff either, as I dont have the resources to cover those items (We Make Money Not Art, Cool Hunting). No, I want to get under the creative process, show it where I think it is manifesting itself, discuss how it gets started and how you manage that process when it’s going. And show how to live your life creatively and have some fun.

Have you been out and looked at the clouds today? If its too cloudy (or clear skies – lucky!) where you are why not download a picture off the internet with some interesting clouds and look at that. Can you see anything in there? (And if you live in the UK, get some Pancake mix on the way home, its Pancake Day!)

southbank bristol arts – new website

Southbank Bristol Arts | Celebrating creativity in our neighbourhood
The new website is now open, its a bit sparse but it will soon be accepting stuff from our artists. It’s made in Drupal version 5, which appears to be a lot better than the older version. It’s cleaner, certainly the administrative interface is much better. And the new top level menus make it a lot easier to put in a meaningful menu structure. When we get more stuff there I will post links, hopefully we will get the artist’s details soon so there will be nice pictures to look at.

escher’s relativity in LEGO

Escher’s “Relativity” in LEGO

Daniel Shui and Andrew Lipson (http://www.andrewlipson.com) worked on the above, it is now their fourth rendition of an Escher picture using plastic bricks. As Andrew explains, the original doesnt actually contain an optical illusion, and its a perfectly feasable scene. Its just that it would be impossible to build in real life because of the different “ups” involved, obviously not a problem for plastic brick figures to deal with!

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Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

A good little video that shows how far the web has come in 10 years. Where will we be 10 years from now?