a simple way to be creative.

Creativity is hard.

Creativity often requires a lot of time and mental bandwidth, but both of those are often in short supply after a long day of work or a long week of dealing with life.

But during the week, as I was having lunch before my afternoon shift, I flipped through a book on 20th century design and came across this picture:

It's an image of a vintage tea and coffee set, where all the pieces were designed after architectural structures. It was a really good example of an idea or a theme from one industry being applied somewhere entirely different, somewhere you wouldn't normally expect to find it. It was, in a word, creative.

But as the week went on, I continued to see this pattern pop-up, from ice-cream themed Nike's to retro speedometer watches to a balloon dog made from metal. As the author Austin Kleon argues, creativity and originality is often just a mix of seemingly unrelated ideas in a novel way.

So, if you're looking for a simple formula to come up with more creative ideas, consider this:
A: Something you know well.
B: Something completely unrelated.
Creative Idea = A x B

Plus a few extra notes on increasing creativity within the formula:

• Pick fields that are distantly related or completely unrelated. The further apart A and B are, the more surprising the result.
• Get specific with A & B, try to avoid generic ideas.
  For example:
  A (salt shaker) x B (New York skyscraper) will give you a much more interesting and detailed idea to work with than B (building).
• Try it backward. If A x B doesn't work, see where B x A takes you.

See you next week,
Arteri ☕