Hey everyone,

I’m still working on the second edition of Organizing Creativity.

It takes longer than expected (it is a spare time project), so, I’m putting the current draft version online.

It contains the content of the wiki I had here, so I have removed it.

Like I said, it’s a rough draft — some parts are (almost) finished, others are missing in part or completely — but to make the best of the longer work process, posting it online gives me the opportunity to ask for feedback. This is your chance to influence the final version. What do you think of the content and/or the layout? Any suggestions for improvement? I’d like to hear them. Drop me a line at danwessel@organizingcreativity.com or write a comment.

All the best

Daniel

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels.
The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.
Woodrow Wilson

It the time between the years — a time when things cool down, usually. It’s a time of remembering and looking in the future — and a good time to put an end to the tiny things that bugged you this year and that you do not want to carry into the next. The tiny annoyances, the small things that bug you enough to notice yet are below the threshold to actually do something about them.

If you think back at the past year, which things did bug you? Think on all the times it did bug you, tiny bites each, but taken together … now is the time to change it.

So, time to take out the trash, fix that leaking faucet, quit the subscription to that newsletter and to sort some newspaper clippings (and much much more).

Have fun & happy holidays

“Do you know what these are?” [Vorna] asked him.
“No.”
“They are from the foxglove flower. A tiny amount of them can give a dying heart fresh life. Like a miracle. But just a pinch too much and they become the deadliest poison. Pride is like that. Too little and a man has no sense of self-worth. The world would wear him down to dust. Too much and he becomes arrogant, vain and boastful. But just enough and he is a man to walk the mountains with.”
“Sword in the Storm” by David Gemmell

Every now and then there’s a presentation you did that you want to remember, because it went really well, because it brings to the point what you want to achieve (e.g., research) and who you are (e.g., how you ask the questions, try to answer them, and present the results). For me, it was a presentation on how to organize a scientific work (dissertation, but also applicable to almost any other type of scientific work), the original German version is here and the English translation is here.

But it’s hard to remember such a presentation — unlike a poster you cannot print it out and hang it into your office. Well, you can’t, can you? Actually, it’s quite easy to export the slides as graphics or PDF files and create a poster from the slides (here: made with InDesign, you can import a PDF and if you check the import options, you can say that each page of the PDF should be imported — if you have already drawn the placeholders for the images, it’s just a click per slide, some resizing (with select all done in 3 seconds) and that’s it):

It’s a bit vain, but on the other side, I want to remember it, especially in an environment where the pressure goes in a rather … different direction. And yes, the slides look better with the original graphics (which I had to gray out due to lack of copyright).

“I have plotted it out — now I only need to write it.”
Some New Yorker Comic

A colleague of mine writes the papers for his dissertation at the moment — using mind maps. While I prefer Circus Ponies Notebook and Outlines, I think his approach has a lot of merit for the more visually minded.

The uses the nodes of the mind map to create a structure he can easily grasp and the commentary fields to the nodes to write the text. The mind map structure gives him a hierarchical order (indispensable if you want to make a text out of it) and the ability to quickly reorder elements of the text. If the work is finished, he exports the mind map as text, which gives him a good first draft of the final text.

According to my colleague, a lot of people work this way and use the platform-independent and OpenSource program Freeplane.

Perhaps this approach is something for you.

Images Copyright by Christian W. Michel

I have translated the poster I did for the MinD-Akademie 2011 in English. I love it — it shows on one (very large) page the whole concept that I try to convey with “Organizing Creativity”. If you prefer it in German find the German version here.

I will probably do a similar version for the second version of the Organizing Creativity Book (still working on it) and use it as navigation help for the Organizing Creativity Wiki (likewise still working on it). But until both are ready, have fun with this poster (note: due to the size — DIN A0 — it is about 7 MB).

The poster shows the different steps that are necessary in organizing creativity. While the process goes top down (yellow arrow in the horizontal center), each step is also another occupation with the topic (yellow arrows upwards to occupation with the topic), which leads to further ideas. I have left the footer for the moment — in case you are wondering it translates as “MinD-Academy 2011 — Future and Research”.

Leonardo da Vinci [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons (cut)

I’m currently listening to a presentation by Prof. Martin Eppler about “Sketching at Work” — showing the power of sketches in business contexts. Sketching is a very powerful tool in creativity and as far as I can see, his book (look into it) or here (order) offers a lot of ideas how you can use sketching to solve and discuss your problems.

Very interesting book and I agree, now that we have tools like the iPad that allow sketching (esp. if you use pens like the Pogo sketch pen) sketching is back.

Very interesting

P.S.: If you like to look at presentations which work heavily with sketches, look at the presentations at Khan Academy or (more professionally) the RSA Animate videos.

“It’s like deja vu all over again.”
Unknown

Something that can happen very easily regarding the references you store in your idea collection are duplicate entries: the same image, document, etc. is inserted twice (or multiple times). And easy way to prevent this in DEVONthink is by using a smart group looking for duplicates in the Inbox only (Note the “Search in: References Inbox”).

I use a database named references and limit the scope of the smart group to its inbox. Whenever I put something in the inbox (new images, files, etc.) DEVONthink compares it to the content of the database and if it finds a file with the same content, it makes the filename bold and blue — and it appears in the smart group.

This way I can simply select and delete the duplicate entries in the smart group and remove the newly copied files, without touching the files that are sorted in my collection.

Trust that little voice in your head that says “Wouldn’t it be interesting if …”
And then do it.
“More Joy of Photography” by Duane Michals

Some time ago, I wrote a posting about Apps that use effects to make even a random photo look like “art”. Yesterday I tried out some effects of Camera+ with a few of my photos. Some of the photos were okay, others were so-so — you wouldn’t look twice. But using the Clarity scene mode (boosts contrast and saturation to insane levels) together with effects like Nostalgia, Ansel, Hipster, Lomographic, etc. and a nice frame produced … interesting results.

As the images are probably at least somewhat NSFW, the image containing a few results is only liked here (sorry about the quality, it’s scaled down to fit into a blog posting and the photos look better by themselves on an iPhone).

It’s strange — you use a semi-professional DSLR and Aperture, and at the end a “simple” app on a mobile phone produces the most interesting results …

It isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you out,
it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.

Sometimes it’s just a small detail that can make you crazy, and with Scrivener’s fullscreen (or now: composition mode) it was the typewriter scrolling. When activated, the line you work with is automatically the vertical center of the screen.

If you are writing the text from scratch, this feature is very useful — you can fixate the same line with your eyes and do not need to go down-down-down until the text is the the very last line of the virtual page (like in Word). But it can drive you crazy if you are editing the text and whenever you type somewhere it is automatically recentered vertically, thus forcing you to visually jump to the vertical center each and every time you change something.

Luckily there is the Format – Options – Typewriter Scrolling Setting in the menu bar, if you disable it, Scrivener does not show this behavior — in the selected view mode. What drove me mad and took me a while to understand is that there are independent settings for the normal window and for the composing/fullscreen mode. Thus, you have to disable Format – Options – Typewriter Scrolling in the composing mode independently from the normal mode, either by going with your cursor to the top of the screen, or by pressing ctrl + cmd + t when in the composing mode.

As you usually do not see the menu bar in the composing/fullscreen mode, it’s easy to miss it.

It’s been a few years since I wrote “Organizing Creativity” and in the meantime I have learned a lot. I am also critical of the style of the book — I wanted to write everything I knew, I did and it shows. It contains a lot of information, but it is not exactly easy to read.

So, I am currently working on a new version, more concise and more useful for practical application. For this version I would like to ask you for your input. How do you organize your creativity? What skills and tools did help you? What gave you a boost in working. The questions are very broad and no matter how trivial or supposedly widely known it is, I really like to hear about it.

Thank you in advance

Daniel Wessel