Creative Journal
Bamboo Creativity
A few years ago I visited The Green School in Bali. In educational terms it is an almost-mythical 'Shangri-la' of a school - The world's most beautiful and ecologically aware institution. It's an extraordinary community that aspires to raise a generation of green leaders.
The Duck Conversation
I have a soft spot for ducks, a poet's weakness for metaphor and love a good provocation, so this was all bound to collide as a teaching point eventually.
The Ninja Box - Experiential Learning
As a serious student of 'Creative Thinking', few things interest me more than the mental state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi christened 'Flow'. If you're not familiar with the term, you'll certainly be familiar with the experience.
Constraints: Beautiful and otherwise
Bonsai is a living art form, practised and refined over many centuries. Its devotees consider bonsai to be a miniature meditation on the beauty of nature. To grow bonsai, cuttings are planted in shallow pots with limited space for water and nutrient reserves. These constraints on space and nutrition keep growth to the desired minimum. When tended carefully, bonsai can live for many hundreds of years and, in Japan, are often passed down from generation to generation. As a bonsai tree grows the developing branches are bent into a pleasing shape by wrapping copper wire around them. It is also ‘styled’ by careful pruning. My inner Japanophile marvels at a culture with such rarified aesthetic sensibilities, and my perfectionist side admires the skill and knowledge involved, but the nature-lover in me finds something unsettling in the deliberate stunting of a living organism which, left unattended, would have become a much larger and very different-looking tree. Does the cultivated shape mean the tree is more than it could have been, or is not what it should have been?
A Game to Introduce Consent
One of the most confronting movies I've ever watched was Rémy Belvaux's 'Man Bites Dog'. It's a fly-on-the wall mockumentary in which a film crew follows a serial killer as he goes about his murderous business.
Invention and Execution - How I'll Kickstart very differently next time!
The problem with people like me - the drifty, dreamy, sideways thinkers, is that we're great at having ideas. Love it! It's always going to be difficult, and that's most of the fun. If you want me to actually do something for you, throw down a gauntlet and tell me it's impossible. I'll happily spend the time to see it that's true or not.
How to Get a Good Idea
I guess you could call what I do 'meta-creative' thinking. I spend a lot of time working on ways to help other people think more creatively by designing tools and processes that catalyse creative thought. I'm a massive fan of 'Ahas'! (Which is actually a technical term in the field of creative thinking). Helping other people have them is always a great way to spend a day...
Creative Thinking - The Primacy of Risk
Over the last couple of years I've been working in collaboration with MethodKit to develop a bundle of card-decks for far-reaching educational change. This involved researching the factors which promote or inhibit creative thinking in school-settings. I found forty-eight of them but there are probably far more.
'Pixel Meth' - On tech and temptation
Do you remember Tamagotchis? They were the first, properly demanding digital diversions that inveigled their way into my classroom. Released by Bandai in the early 1990s, these seemingly innocuous, electronic creatures demanded regular feeding, attention, play and care. They also 'died' if you didn't give them what they wanted.
Wicked Problems and Systems Thinking
One aspect of my role as ICHK's Director of Creativity is the design of experiential learning which support ICHK's Human Technology curriculum. I'm always at my happiest when designing and making something new, especially if can accomplish the double-whammy of being very simple while making something complex a bit easier to understand.
Creative Thinking - Finding fascinations
I'm sure you recognise the image of the 'Tusken Raider'- that timeless jumpscare that preceded Luke Skywalker's initial meeting with Obi-Wan and his immediate need for new trousers. If you are a massive and unapologetic nerd, like me, you'll know that the weapon of choice amongst the Sand People is a 'Gaffi Stick'.
What is 'The Box' we're supposed to be thinking outside of?
When we ask people to 'Think outside the box", we're asking for an idea that is unusual, different...divergent...sideways; a brand-new idea which will impress us with its novelty and value. We're asking for the non-obvious, the esoteric, perhaps even the bizarre and ridiculous, and we think that issuing a demand (or perhaps, more charitably, granting a permission), will somehow make that happen. More often than not it won't.