This week we are reviewing creativity concepts as part of writing a longer piece about creative processes and it got us curious:
What is your list of key practices for catalyzing creative processes?
We are interested in pulling together differing lists of ways to engage with creative processes and modes of innovation — a curated list from authors across our LinkedIn network for our end-of-year newsletter. We’re happy to give credit and links back to each author…
Yesterday Jason Frasca and I posted an article with 22 ways to be more creative in 2022.
Today we are experimenting with 10.
Of course, these lists are somewhat arbitrary — 10 could be 12. Nonetheless the exercise is a good one, and these kinds of lists act as powerful memory tools — reminding ourselves of key concepts to use.
Do any of these resonate with you?
Would you modify any? Do you have your own you’d like to share?
Here is our list:
1. Embrace innovation as a long experimental highly dynamic worldmaking process where the “outcome” cannot be known in advance
2. Treat your life as an experimental project: train oneself to limit moral, factual, or functional judgments so as to follow and be changed by what happens
3. Understand that ideation is not the genesis: making is thinking —. craft probes into the unknown: perturb fields
4. Always experiment with multiplying the effects: “what else can it do?”-- follow, magnify and stabilize aberrant novel effects
5. Experimentally push things across thresholds into new qualitative states
6. Repeat processes and become different with each repetition of the process: move sideways and co-opt transversally
7. Make new tools, assemblages, and fields
8. Don’t solve problems before you invent them: develop constraints and new rules that break old frameworks and block the known at a deep level
9. Embrace complexity, work at multiple scales, and collaborate with others — especially more-than-human others
10. Commit to creativity as a force for the good — and be open to being radically surprised by what this might be
