Category: Blog (the archive of everything)Page 11 of 13
My starting point for gathering inputs to a creative project is the working brief. The technique that I use with participants in my workshops is what I call…
Yesterday I wrote about the inputs you might gather at the start of a creative project. These are what I call inputs in the moment. But there is…
In my last post I described the Kalideascope as a tool for having ideas. You fill it with inputs and then turn it to create new the connections…
In this third video in my series on creative thinking, I go into the concept of curating inputs to the creative process. The combination of our brain and…
In my last post I cited James Webb Young’s definition of an idea as being a new arrangement of existing elements. He goes on to suggest having an…
This week I have begun creating a series of videos to share my teaching on how to have ideas. The videos start with what simple question, what is…
With our household suddenly in self-isolation pending results of a Covid test, my daughter and I are back playing lego together and I’m revisiting that recurring question: how…
It is the moment I look for on my training courses. It is when participants switch from general interest in the topic or material to a moment of…
How do you make sure you get the most out of the investment you are making in your professional development? First you have to commit to doing the…
I am speaking to more and more people who are disillusioned with their work. Often what is in the balance is a purpose-led career versus job security and…
So many things that I am working on at the moment lead me to the conclusion that there is power in the gaps. But I feel like for…
Last night I attended the panel discussion of the excellent Clowns in Crisis conference, hosted by the Online Clown Academy, hosted by. Here are some things I took…
If you are interested in understanding how your organisation should perform in the climate emergency then you should be interested in organisational culture. An emergency is a state…
In March 2020 we were all sent home and we discovered we could meet using video conferencing instead. Suddenly our wide-angled world was sliced to a quarter of…
The fault I find in our journalism is it forces us to engage with some fresh triviality every day whereas only three or four books give us anything…
Boring post alert. Sometimes you need to be boring to be creative. This is a really boring post about something I find myself doing lots and lots: setting…
It wasn’t what I was expecting but volume 5 of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time ends on a cliff-hanger. It is incredible how such separate threads from…
I sit in my current preferred cafe bolthole and the jacket of the person opposite me catches my eye. It’s a slightly faded turquoise, not unlike a jacket…
A year on from declarations of climate emergency in the construction industry I am looking for ways to carry on emphasising the scale of the problem and the…
I’ve realised that quietly, in the back of my mind I am waiting. It hasn’t happened yet, so I just have to wait a bit longer. I am…
Yesterday I was feeling particularly sad about the loss of live music during lockdown and the stories of musicians who just don’t have any work at the moment….
It feels right as I take on my new role at Hazel Hill Wood to read the Hidden Life of Trees. This is an evolving post based on…
This week I ran a workshop with undergraduate students at Imperial College working in design teams at imperial. the aim was to show that it is much easier…
Yesterday my daughter and I left the house and flipped a coin. Heads for left, tails for right. Right it was, then left, then left again, et cetera….
There used to be a sign outside a bakery in London that said something along the lines of, ‘it’s the invisible ingredients – love, care and attention –…
It is tempting to think of a design brief as wholly reliable, a document that contains all the information necessary to execute the design. But design briefs are…
When developing a design brief, it is tempting to start by constraining the problem – by clarifying, by simplifying, by cutting out. But if we want to make…
I’ve been listening the BBC World Service’s podcast ’13 Minutes to the Moon’ about the Apollo space programme. Last night I listened to the episode about Apollo 8,…
Yesterday our household returned home from an imaginary holiday. Despite being in lockdown, we realised that we could imagine going on a trip anywhere in the world. Our…
Across all the of the projects I’m involved with we are working out what can go ahead and what must be postponed. A significant factor in whether to…