Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Vol 15! Creativity on Holiday...
For many the winter holidays mark more than a holiday. It's the signal that life is wondrously expansive, we are not our jobs, and that the new year will surprise us.
We are participating in this tradition of stepping away from our computers and phones and doing things with family, friends, dogs and cats (of course dogs and cats are different from family or friends…)
We will be getting outside – viewing the crazy holiday decorations down the block, walking in the woods, and sea-kayaking out into Newark Bay. But, these are short days and the glorious nights where creativity thrives. As the night encompasses us and we hurry back indoors – it’s time for one of our favorite activities: curling up with a book, a pen and pot of coffee or glass of something next to the fire with John Cage or Carillon bells seeping out of the stereo. Notifications be damned – a bit of reading and a good nap here we come!
These days we are reading on many devices – our reading list goes far beyond books and so we’ve put together a reading list of our top articles from 2021 along with a couple of books that we cannot wait to finish:
15 Concepts for a New Creativity – is a curated list of our articles from the last 100 days. An opportunity to catch up on what you may have missed, wanted to reread or you’ve recently joined us and were looking for a unified source of the articles. Either way we hope you enjoy them.
If you're anything like us, we bet you have your own stack of books awaiting you (please share your favorites), so we are keeping our list to just two books – one a big fun read and the other a shorted far denser exercise:
The Dawn of Everything (David Graber and David Wengrow) – if you’ve been endlessly frustrated by the hype that terribly reactionary and wholly inaccurate global history books such as “Sapiens” have gotten over the last few years – then this is the book for you. It is aptly subtitled “A New History of Humanity” and it lives up to that title offering a paradigm altering view of what human history is, what progress might mean and how diverse the possibilities are for new modes of being alive. (Now, we say this only having read the first 119 pages (it clocks in at 500 plus pages)... what we can say is it is a perfect winter read so far…
Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (Gilbert Simondon. This is one of those books that has had a huge impact on contemporary thought and thinkers of creativity, and despite being written over seventy years ago it has never been translated into english until now. We have been working our way through this book for the last year and folding it into our concepts of creativity. We are still in the middle of it, and hope to finish sometime soon – it is worth the struggle!
That’s what we will be reading so we can cast ourselves forward in 2022, with renewed intention.
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This exercise of selecting the best of 2021 gave us an opportunity to reflect on our ethos, which is designed to address two questions:
Two simple guiding questions. Our lighthouse upon a rocky shore of infinite possibilities.
In 2021 we’ve just begun to answer these questions. To provide you with actionable methods, practices and frameworks to be creative; to innovate. Our ambition is to help our readers elevate their innovative and creative practices, at all scales.
Much, much more to come in 2022 (including some new pencil tips for Iain’s Apple Pencil!)
Wishing you and your family Happy Innovating,
Till Volume 16,
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
We’re How You Innovate
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🌄 P.S.: Volume 15 drawings in Hi-Resolution.
📚 P.P.S.: If any of this resonates – check out our book Innovating Emergent Futures
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