#practicecreativity

A little over a year ago, I had a shoulder problem that basically meant I couldn’t use my left arm very well. Things I had taken for granted were sudden extremely difficult. Things like washing my hair became a challenge with one hand. I had to stop and think and analyze and concentrate to do a number of things but it was a blessing in many ways. I had to be resourceful and creative, and it certainly reminded me what it is like to be a beginner at something which is an excellent lesson in empathy.

Today just spend a few minutes doing an activity with your non-dominant hand. So if you usually write with your right hand, grab a pen with your left hand and write “Have a nice day” and draw a smiley face on a piece of paper. It will likely be kind messy, but that’s OK. We aren’t going for perfection, we are going for a new perspective.

It's Satsuma Time!! I can remember taking weekend drives with my family and buying these by the side of the road. If that sounds weird to you, you are not from the South. Think farmstand without the farm, and ... well, the stand.

Not sure what to do with them besides just peel them open (super easily) and having a great snack and burst of vitamin C. Here are some recipes that I would say are good options.

This is one of the great nuggets of advice in Raph Koster’s 2014 GDC Next conference presentation. Whether you are a game designer or not the beginning and end of the talk are applicable across fields of interest. Among his other comments I scribbled as I watched were his description of creativity being what happens when you try to make oil and water mix. “It isn’t this grand mystical thing. It is actually a fairly straight forward process that you can cause to happen quite intentionally and it is a skill set that you can actually practice and develop into a habit.”

He spends some time on constraints, which is one of my favorite creative idea generators. What if you had to write a poem where each line used every letter of the alphabet? Well check out one way to do that in the tale of The Pangrammatic Fox.

He reminds us that creativity is about taking something out of its comfy place and putting it somewhere else. Ideas arise when you change the context of an idea and ideas change as they move from one context to another. Try taking a tool out of its usual context, try to get past your assumptions about it. He uses the game tools of dice and cards. What can they be used for besides the obvious. Cards can be building tools in a house of cards. Cards can be tossed. Cards can be used as covers for things on a desk. Cards can be ... you fill in the blank. Oh, and regarding the dice, I’ve just added Blueprints, a board game that uses dice and building blocks to my list of games I want to try.

Some people may disagree with the noise solution but personally I like it. Interesting to see that there is some science behind it. He points out Coffitivity that generates coffee shop background sounds for you and if you check out their website you’ll find this link to the research that backs up the claim that some noise improves creative cognition.