Sep 23, 2010 What They Talk About When They Talk About Creativity
I used to razorblade photographs out of magazines at the library as a kid. Eventually the Internet came into view, and suddenly there was this wealth of information that I was accessing and meticulously filing away into folders for reference. It wasn’t until last year that I thought it’d a good idea to make all of this hoarding public. YMFY was born. Creativity for me has always been about different ways of seeing. The more you see and experience, the more creative the work will be. Steve Jobs managed to elucidate the point better in 1996 than I can now, so I’ll just leave you with the quote. Hope you enjoy what I have to share in the weeks ahead.
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” -Steve Jobs