Inspiration, Brainstorming and the Creative Process

This week I was just too tired to read or write much of any­thing. I only have three weeks left of work and each day seems to drag on slow­er than the last. I’m tak­ing this oppor­tu­ni­ty to post links to some inter­est­ing arti­cles and videos I have col­lect­ed over the past few weeks, cov­er­ing the top­ics of inspi­ra­tion, brain­storm­ing and the cre­ative process.

1. Bet­ter Ideas Faster: How to Brain­storm More Effec­tive­ly

This is an impor­tant ref­er­ence for me to keep, as I will be tak­ing an Idea Visu­al­iza­tion course at SCAD very soon. I feel like I have been com­plete­ly out­side of the cre­ative process for the last cou­ple months at work, so I’m look­ing for­ward to jump­ing back in!

 

2. Inspi­ra­tion and Iso­la­tion in the Cre­ative Process — Core77

“Inspiration’s a tricky thing; some artists patho­log­i­cal­ly avoid gaz­ing at the work of oth­ers in order to guar­an­tee their work’s orig­i­nal­i­ty, while oth­ers assid­u­ous­ly mine the canons of his­to­ry to ensure that their art bears the prop­er influ­ences. In the cor­po­rate world, how­ev­er, the bat­tle between “eure­ka” moments and syn­er­gis­tic under­stand­ing has already been decid­ed. While fine artists, fic­tion authors and the occa­sion­al mad-sci­en­tist can work in iso­la­tion, those endeav­or­ing to cre­ate func­tion­al prod­ucts are rarely afford­ed that lux­u­ry.”

3. Eliz­a­beth Gilbert on nur­tur­ing cre­ativ­i­ty | Video on TED.com

I love this video and was orig­i­nal­ly plan­ning to devote an entire post to it. Eliz­a­beth Gilbert exam­ines how we look at cre­ative peo­ple and the pres­sures of the cre­ative process and com­pares that to how cre­ativ­i­ty was looked at in the past in dif­fer­ent cul­tures. It’s 20 min­utes long, but seems much short­er because it’s also real­ly fun­ny.

4. Richard Sey­mour on imag­i­na­tion — Core77