Never underestimate the power of user's creativity.
This is something that I learn and relearn each day. Truth is that no one knows how your product is going to be used in a real-life scenario. Once the product is released, it's up to user to decide how to apply the tool to solve his problem.
A friend of mine shared the following post on Facebook. When I saw it, it put a smile on my face.
I salute the teacher who gave 'A+ for creativity'. We need to encourage these out of the box thinking.
Kids sometimes say unexpected things and share their ingenious perspectives. These new perspectives to look at things are what gets translated to creativity and innovation. Future economy will be fueled by someone who can bring a new idea to the table and collaborate with others to create a new solution.
Rodney Mullen took a stage at TEDxUSC on May 4th. Rodney Mullen is a skateboarder. He started out as a freestyle skateboarder back in early 1980's and won 35 out of 36 freestyle skateboarding competitions by his 23rd birthday. He then had to reinvent himself once new street skating style obsoleted freestyle of skating. He draws parallel of how skating tricks are invented and shared with how hacker community create and share open source projects.
Creative process involves right brain. You need to be able to approach the problem holistically. You cannot look at the problem right in front of your nose. You have to be somewhat distracted with other elements in the picture to see the entire picture. You have to let new idea come to you. And you have to be open to it.
I want to share some quotes that I found today regarding this creative process:
Simply put, people’s ability to think about information in new and unusual ways can actually be hampered when they wield too much brain power. What Dr. Jennifer Wiley and her teamhave found is that one way to get around this is to have a couple of drinks.
I believe sparks for creativity are all around us. We have to let creative thoughts enter our minds. It's not something that each of us sit on our separate chairs and think hard about the problem that we want to solve. High school algebra problems would be suitable for approaches like that. But any real life complex problems will need creativity to solve it differently and solve it better.
Creativity comes from sharing. We have to share ideas with each other. In the midst of exchanging ideas, we are knowingly and unknowingly provoking each other's thoughts from all of our past experiences and lessons. Being able to take in someone else's ideas and get inspired by them are critical ingredients to be more creative.
In that spirit, I want to share a couple of short stories with you.
First one. I was doing some testing last night with engineering team in India. It was Twitter application that we were testing, and we had to come up with short tweets to see if system worked ok or not. Knowing all tweets are public, I knew I wanted to say something meaningful than "hello word", "test 123", "foobar", etc. It was just past midnight, and I was trying to come up with clever things to say. I think it took me about 15+ seconds to come up with each tweet. Even then I was not coming up with interesting things to say.
Then I saw this tweet from one of QA engineer:
"Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love. - Mother Teresa"
Even before the quote sank in, he followed up with another famous quotable:
"It is never too late to be what you might have been." - George Eliot
While I was struggling to come up with something interesting to say, he knew what to share exactly. Interesting quotes make perfect sense. It's thought-provoking yet easy to share without getting distracted by trying to come up with something original to say.
This instantly reminded me Buffer App. Buffer App suggests interesting things to tweet about when you run out of things to say. Perfect solution for those who want to start a conversation, but not sure what to talk about.
Second one. While I was browsing the web for news, I stumbled upon this YouTube clip. It was about an architect, Hong Yi, who started a personal project to paint the basket player Yao Ming. To make it interesting she used basket ball instead of paintbrush to paint Yao Ming's portrait. She pushed this idea further to paint Jay Chou, Taiwanese musician, with coffee cup and coffee stains which she got inspiration from one of his song lyrics. Now she's pursuing another project where she is drawing inspiration from bamboo stick laundry hangers commonly seen in China.
Not only is her project interesting, but also she nicely lays out how she's collaborating with coworkers and Facebook fans by exchanging ideas with them.
Where are you drawing your creative inspirations from? Don't look for them far from you. Capture those that inspires you, and build on them.
Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, was on KQED Forum earlier today. For anyone who wondered about how to be more creative, Jonah shares practical tips and stories about creativity.
Although it did not air today, he appeared on City Arts and Lecture today as well. I think it will air on KQED soon. Jonah has been appearing different speaking engagements as well.
People are natural improvisers. When people see the need not being met by existing system, they apply creativity to solve the problem with existing means. Some might call it wisdom of the crowd. I call it improvising or hacking.
All of us are resourceful by nature. We are wired that way. If you look at all inventions, product designs, processes and so forth, all are created by people because they saw the need. But our creativity does not stop at product design phase. When users pick up something to apply to their problem, they again use their creativity to solve the problem by stretching intended use of the tool. I wrote about this effect earlier.
This creativity does not know boundary. It's happening in China as well. When internet is censored to prohibit Chinese people from searching specific keywords, they are using their creativity to solve the censorship problem. They are creating new urban dictionary terms to create new keywords to get around blacklisted keywords.
People will hack up a solution if there is a need. Whenever you see one, there is an opportunity to improve the current design.
Bo Xilai is ousted Chinese official which triggered Chinese political instability; find out more details from Wall Street Journal
