Creative Thinking as the Regurgitation of Old Ideas

Just got back from a talk put on by the Vancouver User Experience Group titled, "Creative Thinking Hacks." The speaker, Scott Berkun, certainly hit a lot of interesting points during those ninety minutes.

One interesting bit was how society "hero-izes" the great artists and inventors like Einstein and Da Vinci. We like to see them as individuals that did great things out of their own genius and their own drive. However, the truth is hardly so clean. These people didn't sit alone in a room and spontaneously create and invent. Rather, they bounced ideas off their peers and pushed other people's ideas forward.

With today's communication tools it's much easier to do this sort of collaboration. Even though the ideas are mostly for entertainment, I think the HalfBakery is a great example of this kind of collaboration in action. You can definitely see how one person's brainchild gets transformed as the community digests it, yielding something new and creative. Outside this microcosm, with our websites, blogs, and RSS feeds, so much is possible—except everybody's keeping their ideas secret in the hopes of becoming rich and famous. Like Einstein or Da Vinci. (-;

Another big lesson was that ideas don't just appear out of thin air. Ideas come from other ideas. This goes along with the whole bouncing-ideas-off-your-peers thing. Artists and rock bands both find inspiration from the art and music that was made before them. The trick is to take apart those ideas and recombine them in new ways. So find that really cool chord progression and play with it until you come up with something new. Or try mimicking a particular artist's style and then transform it and make it your own.