the Varoom Varoom lounge
a collection of creative thinking resources
the Varoom Varoom lounge
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creative thinking
creative principles
henry miller
"1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9.Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards."
Writer Henry Miller’s 11 Commandments
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creative thinking
"The method stresses openness to ideas that seem irrelevant to the problem at hand - trust things that are alien and alienate things that are trusted."
George Prince 
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brainstorming
creative thinking
creative process
Brainstorming is just the start

David MItchell’s Soapbox video series for The Guardian … this one’s on sustainability.

Produced by ChannelFlip.  Good work.

Made me think how much so many businesses have flexed and changed with the times including things like embracing their multi-faceted ‘Jack of all trades’ talents…

How much have we really changed?  

Ann

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video
creative thinking
channelflip
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creative thinking
planning
Great problems beget great solutions
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creative thinking
engagement idea
content
curation
Kanye West + New Yorker cartoons = good idea
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creative thinking
making things
inspiration
Making things
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creative thinking
starbucks
How good ideas get made ...

youmightfindyourself:

Some insightful lessons from Wieden+Kennedy’s Executive Creative Director, John C Jay. Via AIGA.

1: Be authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique. It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do.  2: Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.  3: Get off the computer and connect with real people and culture. Life is visceral.  4: Constantly improve your craft. Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.  5: Travel as much as you can. It is a humbling and inspiring experience to learn just how much you don’t know.  6: Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group-grope world.  7: Try not to work for stupid people or you’ll soon become one of them. 8: Instinct and intuition are all-powerful. Learn to trust them.  9: The Golden Rule actually works. Do good.  10: If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career.

Thanks again to Damian for finding this.

Ann

Permalink (391 notes)Via: youmightfindyourself
creative thinking
inspiration
youmightfindyourself: Some insightful lessons from Wieden+Kennedy’s Executive Creative Director, John C Jay. Via AIGA. 1: Be authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique. It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do.  2: Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.  3: Get off the computer and connect with real people and culture. Life is visceral.  4: Constantly improve your craft. Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.  5: Travel as much as you can. It is a humbling and inspiring experience to learn just how much you don’t know.  6: Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group-grope world.  7: Try not to work for stupid people or you’ll soon become one of them. 8: Instinct and intuition are all-powerful. Learn to trust them.  9: The Golden Rule actually works. Do good.  10: If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career. Thanks again to Damian for finding this. Ann
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creative thinking
inspiration
Minibar for the mind
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inspiration
insight]
creative thinking
failure
The road to wisdom

Everything is a remix. Ideas are just that - new combinations of things.

Watch part 1 and 2 of this concise video series and see some fab examples of how old stuff has been combined to create something new. 

via Only Dead Fish

Ann

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remix
creative thinking

Watch a 2 min intro video to design and innnovation consultancy IDEO’s Open Ideo, an Open Innovation online community.

 Join up and collaborate with people across the world to solve social problems. Earn your reputation or ‘DQ’ (Design Quotient..a design/ creative version of IQ).

With this ‘DQ’ device, IDEO have neatly packaged and made share-able one of the main reasons that people take part in crowd-sourced innovation stuff - reputation. Will be interesting to see how Open Ideo catches on.  

Check out the slick collaboration tools eg: their mind map showing inspiration and concepts. And their very simple articulation of the idea-generation process - inspiration, concepts, evaluation…final concepts.

Impressive.  And reminds one of what a big difference solid and tasteful art direction and design makes to something.

Ann

PS I’ve noticed an increase in community sites enabling sign up via Facebook open id, not just Google. The giants do battle!

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open innovation
IDEO
community
creative process
behavioural economics
creative thinking
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creative thinking
creative theory
What is creativity? By Kristian Ulrich Larsen
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dave trott
creative thinking
insight
"ONE MAN’S FISH IS ANOTHER MAN’S POISSON.

A few years ago, I went back to Barking, in East London, to visit my mum.
While we were having a cup of tea she said to me, “Isn’t it a shame, that nice young boy over the road’s been locked up for robbery?”
I said, what did he do Mum?
She showed me the local paper.
She said, “It’s in here. It says he robbed a bank. I don’t know about that. He was always very nice and polite to me. Always said “Hello Mrs Trott” and helped me across the road with my shopping.”
I read the report of the trial in the paper and sure enough he’d stuck up a bank with a sawn off shotgun.
But the part that interested me was what his dad had to say.
He told the reporter “They’d better lock the little sod up, if I get hold of him I’ll kill him. That shotgun cost me nearly a grand and he’s sawn the bleeding barrels off.”
I found that fascinating.
Someone found great beauty and value in something.
But to someone else it was just an object to be used.
No big deal.
To his dad it was finely engraved, beautifully balanced piece of craftsmanship to be lovingly polished and oiled.
To the son it was a tool to do a job.
But it wasn’t quite right for the job he wanted, so he fixed it.
The barrels were getting in the way, so he cut them off.
There that’s better.
Now he could carry it under his coat.
In his terms he fixed it, in his dad’s terms he ruined it.
The beautifully engraved barrels were lying on the floor of the shed in a pile of metal filings.
It reminded me of something I read a couple of years back.
Someone bought a house in East Yorkshire and they were renovating it, clearing out the old junk.
There was a tatty old roller blind over the kitchen window, covered in grease.
As they were chucking it in the skip they noticed it had something scrawled all over it.
They unrolled it and found five original David Hockney drawings on it.
The blind was eventually sold for a fortune at an auction.
It will form the centre piece of The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Cumbria.
Thousands of people will pay to come and stand in front of it and look at it.
They won’t be able to touch it because it’s too precious.
But to someone else, all it was good for was to make a blind for the kitchen window.
Do you ever get that feeling about your work?
People don’t appreciate what you’re trying to do.
The job you’re doing isn’t the job they want?
Jim Kelly (founder of RKCR, Y&R) once told me about what he called ‘The Proctor & Gamble Triangle’.
It goes like this.
The account man shows the P&G client the idea: a triangle.
The client says “That’s great we like the triangle idea. But we think it could be better.”
Then they cut the triangle in half down the middle.
They say “We like the left hand side just where it is. But we think the right hand side would be better upside down and moved to the left, like this.”
Then they move the other half across so the two halves now form a square.
The account man says “But that’s not a triangle anymore, now it’s a square.”
They say “What do you mean we haven’t taken anything away. We haven’t added anything. We’ve just rearranged it. It’s still the basic triangle idea you showed us.”
The account man says “But it isn’t a triangle anymore, it’s a square now.”
They say, “Don’t be silly. It’s still exactly the same idea you showed us, a triangle. It’s still got all the elements. All we’ve done is made it better.”
The truth is, no one’s really happy.
Neither side has got what they really want.
Because either the brief has changed, or it’s the wrong solution.
That’s why they’re adapting something to do a job it was never intended for.
They should have started off with a brief for a square.
Then the client would have been shown a square.
Rather than try to adapt a triangle to be a square.
I went to a Bauhaus art school, in New York.
So the mantra was ‘Form Follows Function’.
Get the brief for the function right in the first place.
Then the form comes out of the function.
Don’t change the form to suit a different function.
Don’t go to Purdey’s for a sawn-off shotgun.
Don’t use a Hockney for a roller blind."

Read more from highly respected advertising creative Dave Trott here

Thanks Cormac!