The Great Creativity Illuminator
By Chris Dunmire | Posted 3/25/22 | Updated 8/9/23
Less is more (more or less).
In Dancing in the Rain, creativity imagineer Michael Michalko presents this drawing and asks, "What does it look like to you?"
Perspective is a fascinating position around creative thinking. I read that when most people draw an object, they render it from a straight-on eye-level point of view. Do you do this? How many bowls of fruit or landscapes do you see from a top-down or cutting angle? Cubists Picasso and Klee painted absorbing works of art by considering a non-traditional POV and leaning into abstraction.
Did you know that turning something even slightly changes how light and shadow is cast on it? Apply this to a shift in attitude or way of regarding something to reveal new crevices to think into. Play in curiosity and imagination, and see how you too, can travel through time.
Tinkering
At lunch, I sit next to a professional problem-solver. John tells me that as a child, he couldn't resist taking things apart just to see how they worked. "I was so curious," he says. "Toys, toasters, anything." One day John disassmbled a red LED alarm clock with a butter knife and couldn't get it back together. "I broke it. And got in a lot of trouble that day," he smiles, revealing the trouble was worth it.
What's your "why"? John's is that he loves using both his mind and hands to solve problems, and he finds a way to do it in his work every day. What impresses me most is his attitude and how he's connected his passion with purpose. His tools help him make all sorts of clocks tick again … in between taking them apart and putting them back together.
Author Spotlight
Creativity Imagineer Michael Michalko (Part 1)
Michael Michalko is a highly-acclaimed creativity expert and the best-selling author of Thinkertoys. As an officer in the Army, he organized a team of intelligence specialists and international academics to research, collect, and categorize all known inventive-thinking methods, which when applied to various military, political, and social problems, produced breakthrough ideas and creative solutions to new and old problems.
Discover a few methods with Michalko: Koinonia principles, abstraction techniques, Edison's Idea File, blossom brainstorming, and da Vinci's Idea Box along with perspectives gleaned from Whitman, Darwin, and others in this series.
New Employee Announcement
Today is a great plus-one news day! After participating in our series of Creative ADVENTures, Madam Bedazzle accepted our offer in a brand-new role on the Creativity Portal team!
Bedazzle is an esteemed deck dealer from Kaffeklubben Island, a highly-intuitive, card reader of The Halls™ Deck, used by skilled practitioners of the Arts and Crafts coterie to interpret, forecast, and crochet symbols, motifs, and typography into affirming messages.
Bedazzle worked as an intuitive for the last 23 years, and in a variety of seasonal, remote positions since COVID hit. She has a passion for ant farming in her spare time, and spinning a mix of fact and fiction on the job. She volunteers with organizations that work with at-risk team collaborators to develop listening and group facilitation skills and holding space for art and writing workshops. You may find some of her work in Legend, Sagacious, and Halcyon‽ questionably rollicking.
She looks forward to astounding imaginations in our community and welcomes recommendations about new hard candy flavors.
We appreciate your joining us in providing a warm welcome for Bedazzle, who'll surely surface more often.
With excitement,
Pseudonymic Talent Curators,
www.creativity-portal.com
Engaging Tools
The Great Creativity Illuminator
Oh, the places you'll grow! Join Madam Bedazzle as the host of our brand-new generator for creativity tips, prompts, and other thinkables for your enjoyment and enlightenment. What if the very message you need right now is just a click away?
Imaginative Immersings
The Dancing Stones at Cornwall
Join Molly Anderson in a new POV on the dancing stones at Cornwall as she travels to the ancient site covered with these magical megaliths on a full moon night.
©2022 Chris Dunmire. All rights reserved.