…If you want to make a big change, get all the kids thinking of themselves as a creative person. They’re just going to have that openness that will allow them to come up with new and different ideas that they can choose. When we talk about having ideas, we talk about fluency and flexibility. Fluency means you can quickly come up with lots of ideas like in brainstorming, but flexibility means that they’re different one from the next. So you have lots of ideas and they’re unique ideas. That’s going to help you make a better decision.
I don’t care if that’s about something in your personal life or whether it’s your job of curing cancer, having a better variety of ideas is going to make better decisions.
Source: Boing Boing
…So many kids are not allowed to flourish their creativity. But I was the kind of kid that would take apart the family piano. I can remember I had a perfectly good bicycle I got for Christmas and a few days later I had sandblasted it and painted it a different color. Not that my parents understood why I was always ripping things apart and redesigning them but I was certainly tolerated. So I think it did contribute (to my future career) in a lot of ways. I wish for a lot of other kids that they could tinker like I did.
~ David Kelley, founder of IDEO and the Stanford d.school.
Read the full interview here.
Source: Boing Boing
So few people seem to realize that everything’s designed. And until we get some good people telling the story, that’s probably going to continue to be the case. So I’d love it if there was a consciousness in the public mind that mathematics and reading and writing is not enough — you also need to learn how to do design. Because everything is designed, and the way our world exists around us depends on how well it’s designed.
(via dontoverthink)
Source: vizualize
We’d like every kid in America to have an experience of design by the time they are twelve and have the opportunity to study it in high-school if they want to.
Source: cooperhewitt.org
We need to stop dividing the world into the ‘creative’ and the ‘non-creative,’ and realize that people are naturally creative.
Creative Confidence
“That opting out [of creativity] that happens in childhood … moves in and becomes more ingrained by the time you get to adult life.” (David Kelley)
David Kelley’s company IDEO helped create many icons of the digital generation — but what matters even more to him is unlocking the creative potential of people and organizations to innovate routinely. David Kelley suggests, creativity is not the domain of only a chosen few.
Source: ted.com
Creative Confidence, Innovation, And The Power Of A Child’s Mind
David Kelley founder of IDEO, renowned entrepreneur, designer and visionary talks about the process of creativity, and what we can learn from children who have an innate confidence in their own creative power.
According to David Kelley, it really is true that everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten - because that’s when you had innate confidence in your own creative power. The problem? Figuring out how to get it back as an adult, tap into the power of that creative spirit, and harness it so you can innovate your way to personal and professional success.
Everybody is creative, but at some point in schooling loose their creative confidence. A child’s mind is an innovative mind - children don’t know what they don’t know, vs the limitations of age and experience.
…The author and Stanford University professor Bob Sutton notes that at innovation hotspots such as IDEO, the “beginner’s mind” approach plays an important role, as does the Zen notion of bringing together masters and neophytes. “At places where intense innovation happens, they often combine people who know too little and people who know too much,” Sutton says. The goal is to foster tension “between massive expertise and the ability to see with fresh eyes…
Creativity And Play
At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown of IDEO talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play — with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn’t).
Source: ted.com
