Where do ideas come from?

• Powerful innovations often focus on creating new paradigms, not solving problems of the current context
• Insight through making
  • Effective system design requires insights drawn from serious contexts of use
  • Insight through making prefers bricolage to big design up front
• Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate
  • Brainstorming may often substitute for missing insight accretion systems
• Some kinds of creative insight depend on long-term memory
• Idleness
  • “You get good ideas from years of hard leisure”; Quit Your Job - Wolf Tivy
  • Dyson claims idleness is necessary to the best creative work
  • Kevin Kelly: “Efficiency is highly overrated; Goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.”
  • The Scientific Virtues from Slime Mold Time Mold — see “laziness”

References

• Sosa, R. (2019). Accretion theory of ideation: Evaluation regimes for ideation stages. Design Science, 5, e23
• Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned - Stanley and Lehman
• Seeing What Others Don’t - Gary Klein

Queue

• Mednick, S. (1962). The associative basis of the creative process. Psychological Review, 69(3), 220–232. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0048850
  • The intent of this paper is the pres- entation of an associative interpreta- tion of the process of creative thinking.
• Friedman, R., Fishbach, A., Förster, J., & Werth, L. (2003). Attentional Priming Effects on Creativity. Creativity Research Journal - CREATIVITY RES J, 15, 277–286. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326934CRJ152&3_18
  • The authors tested the hypothesis that a broad or narrow scope of perceptual attention engen- ders an analogously broad or narrow focus of concep- tual attention, which in turn bolsters or undermines creative generation
• Rowe, G., Hirsh, J. B., & Anderson, A. K. (2007). Positive affect increases the breadth of attentional selection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(1), 383–388. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0605198104
  • The present study examined the thesis that positive affect may serve to broaden the scope of attentional filters, reducing their selectivity.
  • Mirroring the broad attentional focus and enhanced creative problem solving during positive mood, individual differences in creative intelligence have been associated with decreased attentional filtering. For instance, creative individuals have been shown to exhibit less latent inhibition, a measurement of attentional decrements to stimuli deemed irrelevant (54).