A short history of this project

Development of the project

The idea started in 2007 when a friend of mine told me about the MinD-Akademie conducted by the MinD Hochschul Netzwerk, a student organization. The topic that year was “creativity” and I became interested in holding a presentation regarding the organization of creativity, because I had started to use a wiki to collect my ideas a few months before. I started a survey of Mensa and MHN members regarding the way the organize their creativity. I did not get many responses and few of them did actually organize their creativity. Since I had good experiences with capturing my ideas and using the wiki as a collection, I made a presentation on this topic and held it in October 2007. Due to the amount of information I did want to present, but had to cut down to fit in the presentation, I wanted to present it in a more coherent and complete form.

So I decided to write a book about it.

Tools used

The ideas for this book were first captured with a paper notepad or directly with a text file on the PC and collected in my DokuWiki. I later used Circus Ponies Notebook to sort them. Then I made a presentation with Keynote that served as basis for a layout prototype in Pages. After the prototype reached about 200 pages, I copy and pasted the contents into a Scrivener file. Then I searched any notes I had made regarding this book if I had included everything I wanted to say. When the Scrivener file was finished I proof-read it, made sure the outline was correct and copy and pasted everything to a modified Pages file. Afterwards I exported (printed) it as a .pdf file and uploaded it to Lulu, the book on demand service I used. Then I received an error message telling me that “Your document could not be created: oc_complete_printversion_p1.pdf: This file was created with Mac OS X 10.5.4 Quartz PDFContext / Pages. We cannot print files created with this application.” I spend the next few hours cursing and taking a page or two of this book (persistence, dealing with setbacks) and finally used Acrobat 8 on a Windows PC to remove all meta data and optimize the file (without changing the fonts that were embedded or the images). Lulu accepted this manipulated .pdf file and hoping that the .pdf printed well I ordered a copy. In the meantime I split the one 400 pages file back into pages files that contained the individual chapters and continued working on the content (it was fun and I needed the distraction).

When the copy came I proof-read it, assessed the layout and gave it some people for feedback. I then corrected the Pages files and uploaded an exported (printed) .pdf file again.

Then, thinking that I should do a webpage about the book, I copy & pasted the contents into a WordPress Blog/Webpage which you are now reading.

Book Navigation

Errata  |  Creativity

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