I think the ”Creative Class” is THE buzzword of 2005. Now Harvard is teaching that the only thing that matters is creativity.
I agree that we have to be creative if we want to discover new ways of working, new ways doing things, but just saying that doesn’t mean a thing.
I had a discussion with my wife few weeks ago about innovation and people’s creative ability. She works as a consultant and helps companies turning from very rigid to being more flexible. It’s a kind of change management exercise.
Her view is that every each of us is born creative in some sense. Humans has from the very beginning been forced to find new ways to survive. In modern times you could ague that the laziness of people has motivated them to find new methods to do what is necessary to do just to reduce time or cut some cost.
The problem that many companies are facing is not that the employee’s isn’t creative, they just forgot. So, it’s more about un-learn what you have learnt and then learn from the beginning – again, and the right way.
And all of a sudden the creative problem has turned into a company-culture thing.
I think my wife is right – but culture issues isn’t always easy to solve. My experience says me that it takes a lot of money, time and sometimes heavy shifts in management style.
Have you been through a cultural shift in your organisation, big one, small one? How was it? Did it help?
Business
Week is joining the growing conversation about getting creative by
launching a new online Innovation & Design portal -www.businessweek.com/innovate
Definitely one of those “magazine’s” worth watching. It’ll be interesting to see if they’ll be able to facilitate the conversation around the different topics…..or we will here on this flight..:-)
Emotional Mapping is a design process that uncovers
feelings and attitudes towards products. It gathers information on why
people prefer one product over the other. It identifies key attributes,
tangible and intangible, overt and subtle, conscious and subconscious,
that help connect products and people. This insight can focus a design
team’s creativity, add clout to the creative process, and result in
more innovative, radical and successful ideas.
Interesting article from Business Week.
The article describes a love-and-hate, black/white relationship when uncovering and mapping different emotions. At first sight it seems right to use a survey when gathering the information, but one thing strikes me – How can a design-team design the feeling of tomorrow? The NEW emotion? Possible? Or is it a “only” best guess?
Now that Hans Henrik is on vacation, Magnus and myself will try to keep the site going. We acknowledge that Hans Henrik is the most frequent writer here, but we’ll try and keep up. Atleast that’s what I attend to do 
I am going to start out with something not quite CPH127′ish. Since it’s summer and most of readers will be reading this from home instead of work, I thought I’d recommend redesigning yourself. I have spend my last week of vacation thinking about what I had to change about the way I worked, the subjects I worked with and so on. This has now returned in a complete change at my company, more about that later on.
Filmproducer Belief has done an amazing film about how to change your desk and be creative. You should watch it, and not fear it’s length! If that interests you, I’ll recommend reading Hugh MacLeod’s manifesto "How To Be Creative", it’s truly a great read and I can’t wait for the book to be published.
Happy vacation, or atleast summertime, everyone - I hope you’re all enjoying it. I spent entire last week at the tiny island of Bornholm, which I captured the best moments of with my new cellphone. You can have a look at that at Flickr.
I think the ”Creative Class” is THE buzzword of 2005. Now Harvard is teaching that the only thing that matters is creativity.