This book stood out to me as I thought it looked extremely interactive and interesting about how to come up with new, creative ideas and the creative process. As I started to read this book I realised it was sectioned into four parts/chapters – MAKING, HACKING, TEACHING and COPYING.
MAKING – how making opens up new parts of the brain. The idea about ‘what makes for great making?’ One of the points is about not having too many facts in your head when trying to come up with ideas, this could affect the quality of the work you are producing. Another prominent factor in the ‘making’ process is to not dive into the work alone and to think about who you want to work with and come up with ideas with. I find this helpful when starting a new project, I like to find out what other people are thinking and bring our ideas together.
HACKING – how becoming a hacker makes you tackle problems in different ways. This is the idea about hacking your brain either yourself, or having someone else hack it for you. The book gives three helpful ways on how to hack your brain, the first is to ‘do something boring’ making your brain seek engagement. Another is to ‘make a mess’, and to seek ‘visual stimulation’ by having lots of objects around you that can inspire you. The third and final tip is to ‘bring the noise’. I prefer to work with music, if I’m doing my sketchbook or a project, it motivates me and helps me stay focused, however I cannot read or think about writing an essay with music, it has to be in silence. This tip says that a study shows that a moderate level of noise can enhance creativity and a high level of noise can impair your creativity.
TEACHING – how teaching yourself and others consolidates experience in a fast-paced world. I particularly liked the ‘doing-by-learning’ section in the ‘teaching’ chapter, it talks about how we might get to the future as creators and essentially destroyers. We have to create new things and jump to them and escape our comfort zone, something I need to work on in my creative life.
COPYING – how looking to what already exists helps you solve your problems. Is copying other peoples ideas necessarily a bad thing? We have been taught that copying is wrong and that we should feel guilty for using other peoples ideas. This book debates that copying is a creative superpower and states that ‘it is in an efficient use of the human mind and without copying each of us would need much more data storage capacity’, comparing our minds to the developing technology.
This book was interesting and had a different look and approach to creativity and idea generation which I found useful.
BETHAN SANDALL 