Hired gun or creative muscle?

18 December 2014 Unknown 0 Comments

Image by Braid Creative and Consulting

Lately I've been thinking about the role engineers play in a company or project. I'm specifically thinking software engineers because that's what I do, but I'm sure this applies to any kind of engineer.

My question is this: are engineers simply hired guns or are they part of the creative muscle?

This article at Braid Creative and Consulting says that everyone is creative so I don't think you can say engineers are definitely creative or they are not. It depends on the individual and also how the organization treats them.

At Instructure—where I work—engineers are afforded a lot of influence in the creative process, but that might just be because of our engineering roots. Like a lot of startups, we were started with software engineers and in the first years of the company the engineers were the mightiest social entity in the company.

Other companies might treat their engineers like lowly hired guns or they might even outsource the engineering so that it doesn't even factor into the creativity of their products and services.

But here's my thought: because of engineers' proximity to the tools of creation, they are readily inspired with flashes of brilliance.

Product people and designers are inherently creative by nature. I mean that's why they're hired to do what they do. They're creative and they know what people like.

Engineers often don't know what people like—except for themselves—and maybe we don't care because we don't get people sometimes, but the one thing we've got going for us is using the tools of creation on a daily basis. Because we're knee deep in the code, it gives us a special perspective to what can be created and what would be awesome to create.

But that's just an idea.

Horace Dediu of Asymco.com says that engineers are creatives. That we are artists even.

What do you think? Hired gun or creative muscle?

Here's to the crazy ones

16 December 2014 Unknown 0 Comments

Steve Jobs is one of my heroes and he is one of the most innovative geniuses of our day. He is the poster child and to some extent the inspiration for our exploration of long-term creativity.

We all know that he led Apple to some of its greatest successes and changed the world in several different categories of products. Of course it wasn't him alone. Jony Ive played a huge role in changing the world along side Steve Jobs, but I'll talk about him another day (he's another of my heroes). And there were hundreds of people who helped them as well.

Many people don't realize, though, the role he played in Pixar. I'm not going to say he came up with the idea of Toy Story or anything like that, but he certainly was a mentor for Ed Catmull, John Lasseter and the Pixar team.
Both Apple and Pixar are great companies with world-changing innovations in their fields. Pixar has had an unrivaled string of #1 movies starting with the first ever feature-length computer-animated film. Neither Apple's innovation or Pixar's creativity are directly and solely because of Steve Jobs, but I feel like there is a connection there.

I plan to explore this connection more in the future, but for now let me share two quotes from Steve.

“I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

Steve Jobs seemed to believe that artists who are engineers also can make great things. And he proved it not once but time after time.

Lastly I want to end with another great Steve Jobs quote. His famous here's to the crazy ones quote. Tell me how much you love this quote in the comments. Enjoy!

Destroy all the creativity! (let's not)

11 December 2014 Unknown 0 Comments

Here's a story on how we inadvertently destroy creativity in children. This is especially endemic in public schools.

On the first day of school, the little boy waved to his mother and turned to run down the bright hallway to class. His teacher smiled and pointed out his desk. “This is going to be great,” he thought. “I love to learn new things.” After a few fun stories, the teacher handed out crayons and paper and announced that it was time to draw a picture. The little boy enthusiastically grabbed the crayons and began to imagine all the things he could draw: mountains, lakes, airplanes, his family, his dog, the ocean, the stars at night…

Hundreds of ideas raced through his creative little mind. His teacher, seeing that he had started drawing, stopped him and said that today the class would be drawing flowers. The boy’s mind again ran wild: daisies, daffodils, roses, carnations, violets, lilacs, pansies, mixed bouquets, green gardens full of rainbows of colors…

The teacher again interrupted, informing the class that today they would be drawing a certain kind of flower. 

Taking colored chalk, the teacher went to the board and drew a green stem, with two leaves, and four identical pink petals. The little boy, eager to please, dutifully copied her drawing.

After several attempts, his drawing looked exactly like hers. The teacher congratulated him for doing such good work.

As the school year passed, the little boy became a very good student; he learned to listen, obey instructions and get the right answers on tests. His parents were very proud of him, and his teacher was impressed with his excellent progress.

When the next school year arrived, the boy had done so well in his classes that he was enrolled in an accelerated program. During the first week of class, the teacher handed out crayons and paper and announced that it was time to draw a picture. The little boy, still in love with art, enthusiastically picked up his crayons and waited for instructions.

After several minutes the teacher noticed that the little boy wasn’t drawing. “Why haven’t you started?” she asked. “Don’t you like to draw?”

“I love to draw,” responded the little boy, “but I was waiting for you to tell us what the assignment is.”

“Just draw whatever you want,” the teacher smiled and left the little boy to his creativity.

The little boy sat for a long time, watching the minutes tick off the clock and wondering what he should draw. Nothing came to mind.

Finally, in a burst of creative inspiration, he picked up his crayons and began to draw:

A green stem, with two leaves, and four identical pink petals.

It's taken from the book A Thomas Jefferson Education by Oliver DeMille where he cites it from a story called The Little Boy by author unknown (though it is often attributed to Helen Buckley he says).

This is such a sad story. Public school isn't the only place this happens, but it feels like they are purposefully edging out art and creativity in favor of science, math, and engineering.

I understand why the world is leaning towards STEM education. Computers and technology are the new hotness and that's where the future is and all that, but without art, STEM-only people will steer us in the wrong direction.

What's your take on this story? Sad or necessary?

Looking for a flash of inspiration? Do nothing

09 December 2014 Unknown 0 Comments

image by zurb.com

I want to start a running segment that we'll do occasionally where we appreciate and analyze what has been written about the creative process. I'll start with a book called The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin. It's the words of several brilliant people like Albert Einstein, Vincent Van Gogh, and several others that I don't recognize, and Ghiselin edited them into one book. It looks like it's an old book and I found it at the thrift store the other day.

The first chapter is on Henri Poincaré, a mathematician. The first thing that strikes me about his musings on "mathematical invention" are the need for the subconscious mind. He says that when he cannot figure out a problem after working on it for a while, he will drop it and go do something else. He mentions walking but not as the exclusive form of "rest" away from the problem. When he returns to the problem, after about half an hour, the spark of inspiration with the decisive idea hits him.

... the revelation, instead of coming during a walk or a journey, has happened during a period of conscious work, but independently of this work which plays at most a role of excitant, as if it were the goad stimulating the results already reached during rest, but remaining unconscious, to assume the conscious form.

I've heard of going on walks or stepping away from the problem, but he describes it in a way that I've never thought about before. He explains that you need to work before and after your rest.

Working on the problem before sets your unconscious mind to work. He even says that you need to work at the problem for several days of fruitless work before you step away from it.

And then working afterward takes what your unconscious has discovered and brings it to your conscious mind.

It is necessary to put in shape the results of this inspiration, to deduce from them the immediate consequences, to arrange them, to word the demonstrations, but above all is verification necessary.

What do you do when you're stuck? How do you find inspiration to solve problems?

Yay Iteration

04 December 2014 Unknown 0 Comments

image by zurb.com

This post is the last in my attempt to introduce my favorite areas. I've done this so when you see posts about these things, you'll understand how they relate to our exploration of the creative process.

Computer programming. This is the only of the three that isn't an "art" form. It's the only one considered engineering (but after posting about creative writing, I'm starting to think that it has engineering in it's blood).

So, since this is the engineering side of me, you probably have guessed how this relates to our study of the creative process and it's long term success.

Programming is like puzzle solving all day long. It's really quite fun. But even though I say it's like puzzle solving, it's very straight forward most of the time.

Sure there are multiple ways to make a solution in many instances, but there's generally a right way or at least a best way. It's fairly linear and not much artistic ability is needed to come up with a solution.

But the things it can teach us about innovation that apply to so many other fields are profound.

The most prominent is iteration. That's not a term too many people use, but it means to do something repeatedly. In the programming world that means you try something and then incrementally make it better each time you try it.

Iterating on a solution for even a small bug is very common. Everything we do is just try and repeat. Try and repeat. Try something out and make it better next time.

It's actually a good mantra for people who are afraid to take the first step to do big things in their lives. Just try it out. You can fix it the next time you try. It doesn't need to be perfect now. Just try it.

Iteration. It's powerful.

This post from Forrst about feedback and iteration talks about it really well (start reading about half way down where you see the same picture as above).

Who has heard of iteration before this post?

Creative Writing

02 December 2014 Unknown 0 Comments

Unlike typography, I have a little bit of knowledge in the field of creative writing. Well, I don't know if I can say that. I have experience with writing creatively (though I don't know how proficient I am at making compelling stories yet).

If I had an area of creative expertise, this would be it. I love writing fiction. I tend toward scifi/fantasy. I try to give my stories a solid theme that helps us to understand the human condition and our spiritual condition and relationship to God. I've self-published one novel and I'm working on my second (plus several that I haven't published—or finished).

Creative writing is a great example of an artful activity that won't be meaningful without some engineering. Come to think of it, most authors "engineer" their work until it is valuable, but they probably wouldn't consider themselves engineers.

It's easy to come up with any story imaginable. You write about fire-breathing jellyfish that come from the sky and burn everyone's pizza every night. It's easy to wander around without end and make the most wild, horrific, or boring story that anyone has ever heard of, but it's not as easy to make a story that is meaningful to readers.

Stories go through so many drafts before they are published. In engineering land we call these iterations or versions, but it is the same idea. You have a great idea and so you write a first draft. This is your first attempt at a solution in engineering.

Next, you have to edit over and over, which is the same as iterating on a code solution in a high-level sense.

What I'm trying to say here is that creative writing follows our pattern of an artful activity that isn't meaningful to many people without an act of engineering.

But we're not just looking for things that fit into our mental model of creativity. We're also trying to find things that don't fit so we can understand creativity better.

I plan to post updates to my fiction-writing exploits here because they're part of my personal creativity journey which will hopefully inform our collective creativity exploration.

So who else is an author of fiction out there? Tell me in the comments what you write, even if it's not fiction.