[LifeHack] How to be creative

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Few tips on the classical topic 'how to be creative':

So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years:1. Ignore everybody: The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you. When I first started with the biz card format, people thought I was nuts. Why wasn't I trying to do something more easy for markets to digest i.e. cutey-pie greeting cards or whatever? 2. The idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to change the world: The two are not the same thing. 3. Put the hours in: Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. 90% of what separates successful people and failed people is time, effort and stamina. 4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail: Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain. 5. You are responsible for your own experience: Nobody can tell you if what you're doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile. The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is. 6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten: Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, "I’d like my crayons back, please." 7. Keep your day job: I’m not just saying that for the usual reason i.e. because I think your idea will fail. I’m saying it because to suddenly quit one’s job in a big ol' creative drama-queen moment is always, always, always in direct conflict with what I call “The Sex & Cash Theory”. 8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity. 9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb: You may never reach the summit; for that you will be forgiven. But if you don't make at least one serious attempt to get above the snow-line, years later you will find yourself lying on your deathbed, and all you will feel is emptiness. 10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props: Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me. 11. Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether: Your plan for getting your work out there has to be as original as the actual work, perhaps even more so. The work has to create a totally new market. There's no point trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle. All existing business models are wrong. Find a new one. 12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you: The pain of making the necessary sacrifices always hurts more than you think it's going to. I know. It sucks. That being said, doing something seriously creative is one of the most amazing experiences one can have, in this or any other lifetime. If you can pull it off, it's worth it. Even if you don't end up pulling it off, you'll learn many incredible, magical, valuable things. It's NOT doing it when you know you full well you HAD the opportunity- that hurts FAR more than any failure. 13. Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside: The more you practice your craft, the less you confuse worldly rewards with spiritual rewards, and vice versa. Even if your path never makes any money or furthers your career, that's still worth a TON. 14. Dying young is overrated: I've seen so many young people take the "Gotta do the drugs and booze thing to make me a better artist" route over the years. A choice that was neither effective, healthy, smart, original or ended happily. 15. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not: Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly. 16. The world is changing: Some people are hip to it, others are not. If you want to be able to afford groceries in 5 years, I'd recommend listening closely to the former and avoiding the latter. Just my two cents. 17. Merit can be bought. Passion can't: The only people who can change the world are people who want to. And not everybody does. 18. Avoid the Watercooler Gang: They’re a well-meaning bunch, but they get in the way eventually. 19. Sing in your own voice: Piccasso was a terrible colorist. Turner couldn't paint human beings worth a damn. Saul Steinberg's formal drafting skills were appalling. TS Eliot had a full-time day job. Henry Miller was a wildly uneven writer. Bob Dylan can't sing or play guitar. 20. The choice of media is irrelevant: Every media's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Every form of media is a set of fundematal compromises, one is not "higher" than the other. A painting doesn't do much, it just sits there on a wall. That's the best and worst thing thing about it. Film combines sound, photography, music, acting. That's the best and worst thing thing about it. Prose just uses words arranged in linear form to get its point across. That's the best and worst thing thing about it etc. 21. Selling out is harder than it looks: Diluting your product to make it more "commercial" will just make people like it less. Many years ago, barely out of college, I started schlepping around the ad agencies, looking for my first job. 22. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself: Everybody is too busy with their own lives to give a damn about your book, painting, screenplay etc, especially if you haven't sold it yet. And the ones that aren't, you don't want in your life anyway. 23. Worrying about "Commercial vs. Artistic" is a complete waste of time: You can argue about "the shameful state of American Letters" till the cows come home. They were kvetching about it in 1950, they'll be kvetching about it in 2050. It's a path well-trodden, and not a place where one is going to come up with many new, earth-shattering insights. 24. Don’t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually: Inspiration precedes the desire to create, not the other way around. 25. You have to find your own schtick: A Picasso always looks like Piccasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven Symphony always sounds like a Beethoven's Syynphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own. 26. Write from the heart: There is no silver bullet. There is only the love God gave you. 27. The best way to get approval is not to need it: This is equally true in art and business. And love. And sex. And just about everything else worth having. 28. Power is never given. Power is taken: People who are "ready" give off a different vibe than people who aren't. Animals can smell fear; maybe that's it. 29. Whatever choice you make, The Devil gets his due eventually: Selling out to Hollywood comes with a price. So does not selling out. Either way, you pay in full, and yes, it invariably hurts like hell. 30. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it: If you have the creative urge, it isn't going to go away. But sometimes it takes a while before you accept the fact.

[Research] 6 techniques to evaluate mobile computing usability

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Kjeldskov J. and Stage J. (2004) "New Techniques for Usability Evaluation of Mobile Systems". International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS) Elsevier, 60(2004):599-620.

Usability evaluation of systems for mobile computers and devices is an emerging area of research. This paper presents and evaluates six techniques for evaluating the usability of mobile computer systems in laboratory settings. The purpose of these techniques is to facilitate systematic data collection in a controlled environment and support the identification of usability problems that are experienced in mobile use. The proposed techniques involve various aspects of physical motion combined with either needs for navigation in physical space or division of attention. The six techniques are evaluated through two usability experiments where walking in a pedestrian street was used as a reference. Each of the proposed techniques had some similarities to testing in the pedestrian street, but none of them turned out to be completely comparable to that form of field-evaluation. Seating the test subjects at a table supported identification of significantly more usability problems than any of the other proposed techniques. However a large number of the additional problems identified using this technique were categorized as cosmetic. When increasing the amount of physical activity, the test subjects also experienced a significantly increased subjective workload.

[Prospective] Marketing shift: detractors are in

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Capitalism, as a tentacular and always-shifting economic form always incoporate/digest/swallow new kind of behavior (see for instance what Joseph Stiglitz describes about anti-globalisation). Guy Debord would be delighted to know that now detractors (= persistent critics of a company or product that mount their own public relations offensive) are taken into account in the marketing process

"One determined detractor can do as much damage as 100,000 positive mentions can do good," said Paul Rand (...) Now some public relations agencies and research companies are studying determined detractors, dividing them into different groups defined by motivation, monitoring their complaints and trying to help corporate clients decide how to react.

Who's next? Are they going to be part of the PR team?

[LifeHack] Tailgating employees of Apple R&D facility

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I like this kind of story, told in wired

Avitzur sneaked into Apple's California HQ for six months to write a software program that, through luck and hard work, is still included on every Mac sold today.Unemployed and living on savings, Avitzur worked 12-hour days, seven days a week, to create Graphing Calculator in the unlikely hope that Apple would bundle it with new computers. (...)Avitzur and Robbins worked in vacant offices, avoided Apple security and gained access to the campus by tailgating employees as they showed up for work.(...)"We thought we were artists, and it was the responsibility of artists to get the work out there. That motivated a lot of what we were doing. But we were loose cannons and we didn't answer to anyone. There was no accountability. It was a lot of fun." Avitzur got a lot of support from Apple employees, many of whom had had pet projects canceled and were sympathetic. Skunkworks projects are a long-standing tradition in Silicon Valley. Many engineers work on personal projects in the hope they will be turned into products, even if they've been previously canceled. Companies like Google recognize the tradition, allowing staffers to spend 20 percent of their time on private projects.

Avitzur wrote up is experience here.

[Locative media] free-of-copyright street level maps of London

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Nice collaborative cartography project: UO Faculty of Cartography

We're making free-of-copyright street level maps of London, starting in the East End and working outwards. If you feel you need to know why, read our WhyLondonFreeMap document. We plan to rapidly develop evocative prototypes, working through Steps 1-3 below, and repeating, working outwards.
  1. Step 1 - Collect GPS data
  2. Step 2 - Normalise and Synthesise Data into Real Shapes
  3. Step 3 - Annotate Shapes with Real-World Semantics
  4. Step 4a - Annotate Completed Map with Civic and Historic Information
  5. Step 4b - Find Partner Organisations to Contribute to, and Back, the Project
  6. Step 5 - Give Everything Away

[Life Hack] Presentation software?

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I like Edward Tufte's point on presentations. One of his reader asks how to make presentations: techniques, handouts, display technologies.In your discussion you seemed to have a dislike for using Microsoft's Power Point. Is there an alternative software package for presentations? Of course the guy misses the point: PowerPoint is not the problem, it's just a software; the idea is rather that using this kind of slide presentation (heavily bulleted) IS a problem since it constrain the information flow/thinking process.

It is astonishing that people have somehow managed to teach and to give talks for thousands of years without "presentation software"! In the first place, don't begin with the question "What presentation software should one use?" but rather with "What are the thinking-learning-understanding tasks that my displays and presentations are supposed to help with?" Answering this second question will then suggest technologies of information transmission.

So if you are teaching a course in art history or architecture, you will need to show a lot of high-resolution color 35mm slides and to provide color thumbnails on a class handout (paper). To present statistical data, you'll need to hand out annotated and sourced tables, graphs, and charts on paper.

If the presentation is about strategic thinking or project planning, you will want to avoid the dreaded bullet list. On how the bullet list makes people stupid, see Gordon Shaw, Robert Brown, and Philip Bromiley, "Strategic Stories: How 3M is Rewriting Business Planning," Harvard Business Review, 76 (May-June 1998), pp. 41-50.

And there is nothing like the real thing; show your audience the actual physical object you are talking about. If the content consists of sound and motion, show sound and motion.(See my earlier response on multi-media for more on this.)

For medical case presentations, see the display in Visual Explantions, pp. 110-111 and the articles by Seth Powsner and E.T. cited there.

Overhead projectors and PowerPoint tend to leave no traces; instead give people paper, which they can read, take away, show others, make copies, and come back to you in a month and say "Didn't you say this last month? It's right here in your handout." The resolution of paper (being read by people in the audience) must be ten times the resolution of talk talk talk or reading aloud from bullet lists projected up on the wall. A paper record tells your audience that you are serious, responsible, exact, credible. For deep analysis of evidence and reasoning about complex matters, permanent high-resolution displays are an excellent start.

For a devastating parody of PowerPoint, see Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint, by Peter Norvig (http://www.norvig.com or a mirror site which you can easily track down in Google).

One more example. If you are teaching math, hand out the proofs on paper at the beginning of class to all the students; then work through the written-out proofs aloud in class, following the proofs on paper. That way your students aren't merely making notes and recording your words; instead they are thinking. I believe that students should THINK in class, not take notes. So give the students your lecture notes and go through them carefully in class, trying to insure understanding of each part as you go. Your voice in effect annotates and explains the material on paper. (Of course, these ideas apply widely, not just to teaching math.)

I have written specifically about making presentations in Visual Explanations, pp. 68-71.

-- Edward Tufte, May 28, 2001

[Tech] Decentralized RSS feeds to fix the bandwidth problem?

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Read in teledyn

At the top of the webstats, the smoking gun: 30,000 requests for the Drupal-generated RSS feed from teledyn.com (...) The way RSS is to work, everyone subscribes to a small file on your site. The critical word there is ‘everyone’. (...) Herein the black hole of RSS: If your feed works, if you are successful in attracting subscriptions on a global scale, if you do it right, you are doomed.As friends tell friends, as links lead to visits which lead to subscribers, the snowball rolls on towards that day like last Friday. RSS may have the potential to be a saver on bandwidth, but when you are getting hit once an hour or more by thousands of sites, 24,000 extra hits ads up, and it’s all the worse when so many are using broken clients that ignore the caching rules. (...) I’m not sure there is an obvious solution. We might install globally distributed caching of RSS files on behalf of the sites, isolating them from the broken clients, but isn’t that already in place? Isn’t that what proxy servers for AOL and other ISPs do to “speed up your internet” already?...

[Research] Lab experiment versus Field study to evaluate mobile computing

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J. Kjeldskov, M.B. Skov, B.S. Als and R.T. Høegh (2004)Is it Worth the Hassle? Exploring the Added Value of Evaluating the Usability of Context-Aware Mobile Systems in the Field(.pdf):

Evaluating the usability of mobile systems raises new concerns and questions, challenging methods for both lab and field evaluations. A recent literature study showed that most mobile HCI research projects apply lab-based evaluations. Nevertheless, several researchers argue in favour of field evaluations as mobile systems are highly context-dependent. However, field-based usability studies are difficult to conduct, time consuming and the added value is unknown. Contributing to this discussion, this paper compares the results produced by a laboratory- and a field-based evaluation of the same context-aware mobile system on their ability to identify usability problems. Six test subjects used the mobile system in a laboratory while another six used the system in the field. The results show that the added value of conducting usability evaluations in the field is very little and that recreating central aspects of the use context in a laboratory setting enables the identification of the same usability problem list.

[Weird] Artificially stimulated religious experience

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Via the economist:

PEOPLE with temporal-lobe epilepsy are prone to religious hallucinations. Two decades ago, this finding led Michael Persinger, a neuropsychologist at Laurentian University in Canada, to try stimulating people's temporal lobes artificially, to see if he could induce a religious state in them. He found that he could. By exposing volunteers' temporal lobes to a weak magnetic field, he was able to create in many of them the sensation of an ethereal presence in the room. (...) The origins of religious experience are one of the most mysterious phenomena in brain science. It would be nice to get a straight answer.

[Book] The Zenith angle

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After reading Bruce Sterling's last bookI was wondering whether it a great one or just one of the clancy-like novel you read in the hall of a railway station. I have always been a great fan of sterling's work but this book is a bit different. First because sterling does not tell us a story about the future (well, that's notmuch of a problem for me) and second because of the plot. I really appreciated Distraction his previous novel, in which the plot was fuzzy. Here it's a even fuzzier, you get it at the end (which I found cool). I liked the book, especially because:

  1. the caricature of the american administration is OK and funny for a european. Besides, he's criticizing the Bush administration in a better way than others.
  2. the mise en scène of the terror bubble is interesting. The terror bubble is what replaced the dot-com bubble after the dot-com crash and september 11.
  3. theambiance is really compelling (maybe because I am in the academic world)
  4. Sterling took the risk to shift a bit from his previous novel
  5. I like Sterling's funny sentences (like "he wore his pants way above his waist", it's dumb I like it)
  6. hum it's silly but at the end, derek's pal call him from geneva to ask him to come work there and it's just few blocks of my appartment...just found it funny.

This review is a bit of a mess

[Prospective] Battelle's predictions for 2005

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John Battelle's predictions for 2005. Among all, I find some interesting (or, I consider those as possible with regard to my current knowledge):

  1. 2005 may be a more fractious year in the blogosphere : We will have a goat rodeo of sorts in the blogging/micropublishing/RSS world as commercial interests push into what many consider a "pure medium.
  2. By the end of the year, the world will begin to realize that "blogs" are in fact an extraordinarily heterogeneous ecosystem comprised of scores, if not hundreds, of different "types" of sites.
  3. Google will do something major with Blogger. I really have no idea what, but it's overdue
  4. Yahoo and Google will both test systems that combine local merchant inventory information with search, so that merchants can use search as a direct sales channel
  5. A third party platform player with major economies of scale (ie eBay or Amazon) will release a search related innovation that blows everyone's mind
  6. Google will introduce Video search at some point in 05, but it will stay in Labs.
  7. Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation

Let's see...

[Prospective] Battelle\'s predictions for 2005

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John Battelle's predictions for 2005. Among all, I find some interesting (or, I consider those as possible with regard to my current knowledge):

  1. 2005 may be a more fractious year in the blogosphere : We will have a goat rodeo of sorts in the blogging/micropublishing/RSS world as commercial interests push into what many consider a "pure medium.
  2. By the end of the year, the world will begin to realize that "blogs" are in fact an extraordinarily heterogeneous ecosystem comprised of scores, if not hundreds, of different "types" of sites.
  3. Google will do something major with Blogger. I really have no idea what, but it's overdue
  4. Yahoo and Google will both test systems that combine local merchant inventory information with search, so that merchants can use search as a direct sales channel
  5. A third party platform player with major economies of scale (ie eBay or Amazon) will release a search related innovation that blows everyone's mind
  6. Google will introduce Video search at some point in 05, but it will stay in Labs.
  7. Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation

Let's see...

[The World] What about cell phone booths?

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Via Mobile research forum newsletter, the fortwayne gazette:

Phone companies in the US have eliminated more than a million traditional pay phones in the past eight years, many of them in phone booths. Now, some restaurants, libraries and other businesses are slowly bringing back phone booths, without the phone this time. Users bring their own mobile phone and can talk as loud as they want without bothering anybody else or being asked to step outside. The quest for privacy drives 98 per cent of Americans to go to another room or outside when talking on a cell phone, according to a recent survey. Some retreat to a restroom to make calls. But few things are more irritating than having to listen to the sound of toilets flushing during an important conversation - 77 per cent of the survey respondents said they were subjected to such toilet gaffes. In Europe, where cell phone use is ubiquitous, an industry has cropped up to make and promote modern cell phone booths. Isomax Dekorative Laminate AG in Austria, is proposing that its laminate cladding boards could be used to make a booth with retractable walls. Antti Evavaara, a Finnish furniture designer, has sold hundreds of mobile-phone boxes for several thousand euros each since 2002. The booths, dubbed 'Silence', are designed for waiting areas, airports and hotel lobbies. They resemble C-shaped chairs with clear side panels. Evavaara recently announced plans to mass-produce the box in as many as 67 colours. The most popular colour so far: bright red.

[Research] Locative Media effects on the City

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Antony Townsend's take about locative media and its effects on urbanism. Really interesting. Thomas also point us to other claims.

a clear understanding of the implications of locative media, good or bad, is unlikely to emerge soon from research and observation. The problem is simply too complex for easy answers. These technologies are being deployed in a highly decentralized manner by a wide variety of actors. On top of this is layered a mosaic filter of cultures and subcultures absorbing these new innovations at different rates and appropriating them for their own needs.

One way of bringing some structure to this debate which I have employed lately is to place this moment of indecision about locative media into a historical context, looking back to previous technological transformations of the urban landscape. (...) Yet like the automobile, locative media are likely to boost demand for mobility and the energy consumption required to achieve it. While efficiencies will surely be realized in supply chains and other bulk distribution services, it may all be offset by increased movement of individuals engaged in spatial arbitrage to gain an advantage in social or professional transactions. (...)

Thus there are two equally possible scenarios &– that locative media are the trigger for an unsustainable explosion in personal mobility in the world&’s great cities, or that they are the key to unlock knowledge that will help us achieve a sustainable global urban system.

[Research] First CatchBob experiment

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Today we had the first catchbob experiment; it worked pretty well; the group completed the game in 13 minutes (It might be too easy, maybe we should have a mobile Bob). Thanks to the self-confrontation at the end of the game, we noticed interesting things, like the way they infer stuff from location information. It sounds promising!The video is here (mov, 4Mb).