on. People don't live on a street (no one lives "on Oakdale Drive"), they live in a block.("I live in Block 61.")

Weirder still, buildings have numbers, but they are based on when the building was built. The first building constructed in 1950 is called "1," the next one from 1953 is "2," and they don't have to be next to each other, which means a typical city map in Japan might look like this:

...which is pretty much the opposite of how we do it.

I had no idea you could organize a city this way, but, of course you can. And once you see that a totally different logic works, you think, hmm, "What I know is not how things must be. What I know is often just a routine." So much of what we call knowledge is a habit of seeing.

Breaking Routine

Derek tells another story. "There are doctors in China," he says, "who believe it is their job to keep you healthy. So any month you are healthy, you pay them. Any month you are sick, you don't have to pay them because they failed at their job. They get rich when you are healthy, not sick."

"Many introverts seem to know this instinctively, and resist being herded together. Backbone Entertainment, a video game development company in Emeryville, Calif., initially used an open-plan office, but found that its game developers, many of whom were introverts, were unhappy. “It was one big warehouse space, with just tables, no walls, and everyone could see each other,” recalled Mike Mika, the former creative director. “We switched over to cubicles and were worried about it — you’d think in a creative environment that people would hate that. But it turns out they prefer having nooks and crannies they can hide away in and just be away from everybody.”

Privacy also makes us productive. In a fascinating study known as the Coding War Games, consultants Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister compared the work of more than 600 computer programmers at 92 companies. They found that people from the same companies performed at roughly the same level — but that there was an enormous performance gap between organizations. What distinguished programmers at the top-performing companies wasn’t greater experience or better pay. It was how much privacy, personal workspace and freedom from interruption they enjoyed. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said their workspace was sufficiently private compared with only 19 percent of the worst performers. Seventy-six percent of the worst programmers but only 38 percent of the best said that they were often interrupted needlessly."

Compares scenes from the Matrix to other video works.

"Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you‘ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it‘s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven‘t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in. (Think of all the podcasting companies — including Ev Williams’ Odeo — before iTunes built podcasting functionality in.)"

"Creation is entirely dependent on ownership. Ownership not as a percentage of equity, but as a measure of your ability to change things for the better. To build and grow and fail and learn. This is no small thing. Creativity is the manifestation of lateral thinking, and without tangible results, it becomes stunted. We have to see the fruits of our labors, good or bad, or there’s no motivation to proceed, nothing to learn from to inform the next decision. States of approval and decisions-by-committee and constant compromises are third-party interruptions of an internal dialog that needs to come to its own conclusions. Your muse can only be treated as the secretary of a subcommittee for so long before she decides to pack up and look for employment elsewhere. If you aren’t able to own the product and be creative, then you aren’t able to do your work, and if you’re not doing your work then you’re negating a very real part of your personality, which is no good for anyone."

"I do believe you want a vision, so you start off with a person who has a vision for a story. And we do things to try and protect that vision and its not easy to protect it, because they feel these pressures. They also have misconceptions about the creative process sometimes. We do have these people who we give a chance to on the belief they’re right, and can rise to the occasion, and we are wrong sometimes, because we can’t see what goes on in their heads. And our measure, because we can’t see inside people’s heads, is the team. If the team is functioning well, and healthy, it will solve the problem."

"Unbelievable use of optical trickery in this new clip for Moray McLaren's track "We Got Time". Every last bit of animation in this piece was done in-camera, and since that claim is slightly hard to believe, director David Wilson has included a nice making of that spells it all out. "Using both praxinoscopes and the technique of matching up the frame rate of the spinning record to that of the camera, no computer super-imposing was used; what you see is what rolled off the camera. The transitions between each section of animation was created by simply cutting or wiping between the bits of footage." All the animations were created, drawn and coloured by the director David Wilson."

"Then I realized why I need to start a new company. Not for the money. Not because I’m “bored”. But because a company is a laboratory to try your ideas. (The word “laboratory” is defined as a room for research, experimentation or analysis. I think of it as a sandbox or playpen.) "

""We sometimes say that adults are better at paying attention than children," writes Gopnik. "But really we mean just the opposite. Adults are better at not paying attention. They're better at screening out everything else and restricting their consciousness to a single focus." […] While this less focused form of attention makes it more difficult to stay on task - preschoolers are easily distracted - it also comes with certain advantages. In many circumstances, the lantern mode of attention can actually lead to improvements in memory, especially when it comes to recalling information that seemed incidental at the time."

an aesthetic sampler

"I have no expectation of what happens next, but here’s a manifesto. Being interesting is as important as being useful. Making things that delight and inspire is as important as creating value. Old systems are crumbling; the best you can do is be nimble, smart and make some trouble. We’re on the cusp of a few things that I want to be part of. The web-of-things, post-digital, and all that stuff. The geographic web and the mobile phone as a superpower. And maybe efforts avoid ending the 21st century as we started the 10th. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m not particularly good at talking, writing or thinking out-loud about these issues. Certainly not as good as some of my friends. But I do seem to be able to make things, and that seems like a valuable skill."

"For a while, I’ve personally been focused at thinking about photography in these two buckets, craft and science if you will. But, just as I got too comfortable with that thought, something in the back of my head sits up and points out that I’m missing something important. There are skills that don’t fall into either the craft or science buckets. These skills include the ability to conceptualize what you want to communicate in a photograph, the ability to provoke an emotional response in a viewer of the work, the vision to look at things in a way that is intriguing, or the ability to suss out what is important in a fast moving and world changing event. This is the real art of photography. It’s what transcends simple documentation into an image with the power to either move one to tears or a smile, or even to change the world."

Excellent expression of the strangeness about designing something: "When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you're lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can't really explain that part; it's like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem! Now, if it's a good idea, I try to figure out some strategic justification for the solution so I can explain it to you without relying on good taste you may or may not have. Along the way, I may add some other ideas, either because you made me agree to do so at the outset, or because I'm not sure of the first idea. At any rate, in the earlier phases hopefully I will have gained your trust..."

"For most of your young lives, you’ve heard your mom and I occasionally talk about your futures by saying that someday you’ll travel off to college and get this thing called a degree that will show everyone that you are an expert in something and that will lead you to getting a good job that will make you happy and make you able to raise a family of your own someday. At least, that’s what your mom and I have in our heads when we talk about it. But, and I haven’t told your mom this yet, I’ve changed my mind. I want you to know that you don’t have to go to college if you don’t want to, and that there are other avenues to achieving that future that may be more instructive, more meaningful, and more relevant than getting a degree."

fight it

10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.

For too long, we have educated people for a world that no longer exists, extinguishing their creativity and instilling values antithetical to those of a free, 21st century democracy. The principal objective of education as currently provided is to ensure

the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital

documenting his experience of being disconnected for a week

collection of game ideas with associated flickr groups

wow. you should really watch this.

iruses, spam, identity theft, crashes: all of these were the consequences of a certain freedom built into the generative PC. As these problems grow worse, for many the promise of security is enough reason to give up that freedom

behind their nostrils. They had to be for breathing, didn’t they? He tried to come up with an alternate hypothesis, and couldn’t—but then he couldn’t come up with a way to confirm his own hunch, eithe

We've lost our Everyman ability to build, maintain, and repair the devices we rely on every day. And that's making it harder to solve the country's nastiest problems

Self-regulation is a critical skill for kids. Unfortunately, most kids today spend a lot of time doing three things: watching television, playing video games and taking lessons. None of these activities promote self-regulation.

excellent quotes from Einstein

identify nine common types of re-appropriation practices that use copyrighted material:

This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do.

People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of us.

Globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas--that is, the scalable part of production, in which more income can be generated from the same fixed assets through innovation.

Learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first. Real learning si a cycle of questioning, experimenting, and reflecting. It's how we convert curiosity into an innovative solution, so learning must BE the work, not something separate fr

If enough Internet users begin to prefer PCs and other devices designed along the locked-down lines of tethered appliances, that change will tip the balance in a long-standing tug of war from a generative system open to dramatic change to a more stable, l

“Thus the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees” - Arthur Shopenhauer

"creativity is as important as literacy" "if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original"

"It's that man down the corridor," he explained. "Every time I go by his office he's just sitting there with his feet on his desk. He's wasting your money." "That man," Ford replied, "once had an idea that saved us millions of dollars. At the time, I bel

A new theory suggests that creativity comes in two distinct types – quick and dramatic, or careful and quiet.

blo Picasso did this copy of a Raphael drawing when he was 17 years old,” the professor told the students. “What have you people done lately?” It’s a question we all ask ourselves. What have we done lately? It rattles us each birthday. It surfaces

The way you work can have a huge impact on your creative success. We present the best advice from leading designers on every stage of the creative process, so that you can keep clients satisfied and make the most of your talents

This is a general category of Creativity and Innovation Techniques, simply listed in alphabetical order.

including me) that weren't classicly trained in graphic design. Many of us got to web design through a computer hobby, through computer science school, through psychology (think human/computer interaction), through journalisim, etc. These kind of posts re

Are you capable of multiplying 147,631,789 by 23,674 in your head, instantly? Physicist Allan Snyder says you probably can, based on his new theory about the origin of the extraordinary skills of autistic savants

the humanist psychologist Liam Hudson looked at British schoolboys, concentrating on whether they were convergers or divergers -- his terms for two different thinking styles, characterized respectively by convergence toward "one right answer" on the one h

Will Wright explains how games are unleashing the human imagination.