Last week's post on creativity was mostly about the personal side of creativity, talking about both engineers and artists. I want to touch on the economic side of creativity, and talk some ideas about what the Internet means for creativity in a city like Tacoma. The Internet is Really Really Great (for creativity) Consider this hypothetical, but very common, example of why the Internet is great for the arts and creativity: An artist wants to sell her art as greeting cards, posters, t-shirts, etc, to make some extra income. She can use the web as a virtually unlimited and virtually Read more…

I want to highlight a comment from Lance Kagey on the previous post. He talks about both the engineer and the artist and the wide spectrum of creativity. His brother, an engineer who spent hours dreaming and imagining new ways to build integrated circuits. And he talks about the artists, who spends their time over a hand-cranked press creating posters once a month. Both the dreaming and the doing are on the creative spectrum. Small excerpt: When Tom Llewellyn and I started Beautiful Angle we had a specific conversation about trying something new. "If we could take money out of Read more…

Last Sunday’s panel on creativity was part of the programming for the Tacoma Reads book, The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind.  The panel was very good: how creative people worked, why they worked, what they got out of it, etc. What was lacking is that which I think lacks from most discussions of creativity: a real investigation into the spark of creativity. It lacks because it’s so hard to quantify, and it’s so situational. So, I think I’m going to turn this into Creativity Week here, and try to get a post a day up about it. I’ll talk about Read more…