Being Creative in a Digital World: pre-reading *updated*

This post is part of the preparation support for a session I will be running, called ‘Being Creative in a Digital World’. If you’d like to invite me to talk to your team about creativity, education, technology and innovation, please contact jenny.bourlet@capita.co.uk.

For those who I am going to be talking to, this post should give you a sense of what is coming, and what to do beforehand.

The workshop is designed as interactive and practical  workshop which will allow you to develop ways in which you can use the digital space to stimulate creativity, generate ideas, solve problems and learn. We will explore how to create a personal learning network through which you can remain current, stimulate new ideas and adapt rapidly.

Outcome: To share ideas and tools to release creativity, where / when it seemed hard before.

Method: Pre-reading/watching/listening – followed by interactive presentation and discussion session.

Before the session, please take in at least two of the media below, considering the following questions:

• What does ‘Creativity’ mean to you?
• Which sorts of obstacle to creativity do you experience at work?
• When do you find yourself being most creative’?
• Alone or in a crowd? What role do others have in your creative moments?
• Is creativity possible in ‘normal’ life and while doing mundane tasks?

Finally, for those who do not mind a little explicit language, here is a link to a clip from the Channel 4 comedy TV series – Nathan Barley – which I think was a cruel and funny satire on the ‘creative’ industries. Creative leaps come from strange places, and inspiration for new ideas and trends can emerge from taste makers who read the ‘Zeitgeist’ ,… But, this clip is a reminder of what happens to unleashed ‘creativity’ in the wrong hands.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/nathan-barley/video/series-1/episode-4/geek-pie

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

- Scott Adams (American cartoonist)

“The air is full of ideas. They are knocking you in the head all the time. You only have to know what you want, then forget it, and go about your business. Suddenly, the idea will come through. It was there all the time.”

- Henry Ford (American industrialist)

“Speed is absolutely key to creativity. The more time it takes to create something, the less likely you are to create something.”

- Patrick Stump (American musician)

 

“Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”

- Charles Mingus (American jazz musician and Civil Rights activist)

 

“Creativity is contagious, pass it on”

- Albert Einstein (German theoretical physicist)