It’s now twenty years since the launch of Pac-Man, and the inspiration for that early video game is a stereotypical story of creative genius. Toru Iwatani, an employee at Japanese game company Namco, wanted to create a new kind of video game. He wanted to exclude the violence of Space Invaders, bring women into what was then the male-dominated world of video arcades, and incorporate cute...
The year was 1497 and Leonardo da Vinci was working on a fresco in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. The fresco was only 460cm by 880cm but da Vinci’s reconstruction of the Last Supper still wasn’t complete after two years of work. A prior at the monastery wrote to the artist to complain about the delay. How could one small part of one wall take so long to paint, he demanded. Da...
In early 1913, the Russian artist Vasily Kandinsky was wrestling with a problem. He had returned from Moscow the previous December and he wanted to portray in a painting the “extremely powerful impressions” he had experienced in the city. Kandinsky was a pioneer of abstract art so he played with form and lines and colors to re-create what he had felt in Russia’s capital and could recall of his...
Some people are more creative than others. Some people are naturally left-brained, and others naturally right-brained. Some people are good at science and math; others are better at art and literature. Those are two different ways of thinking employed by two different kinds of people. Either you’re creative or you’re not. That’s often how people think of creativity. It’s a gift, like the ability...
Creativity is often portrayed as something almost magical. Inspiration doesn’t grow; it strikes. Ideas arrive fully-formed and completely different to anything that’s come before. The creative types who come up with these ideas are framed as geniuses, a group unlike the rest of us, born with a unique set of abilities. While mere mortals can only copy what came before, creating variations on a...
“I was working for Google Maps then as a software engineer,” recalled Tatsuo Nomura in a BBC interview, “and every year Google would do an April Fool’s joke. I did a couple of them and one of them was called Pokemon Challenge. Because I was a huge Pokemon fan when I was a kid… I thought it would be interesting if I put the Pokemon on Google Maps and have the users find them and catch them.” And...
Being an artist always seems like such a lonely job. They always have to work alone, surrounded by half-completed canvases, overturned paint pots and wobbly easels. At best, they’ll have a model to console themselves with at the end of the day – unless they’re painting a still life – but usually, if a painter talks about his ideas, it’s to himself and to his work in progress. Writers are little...
It sounds either horribly confusing or wonderfully psychedelic. Synesthesia is the ability to hear in color, taste words or imagine numbers as shapes. The condition comes in a variety of different forms, with the most common linking numbers or days of the week with a color. “Tuesday” might be red, for example; “3” could always look green. Other synesthetes might associate low musical notes with...
“Think Different” says the slogan of the world’s most creative company — the firm that imagined what would happen if you combined touchscreens with mobile phones then blew them up into the most mobile of computers. With hindsight the success of the iPhone and the iPad looks stunningly obvious but you can have a lot of fun trawling the Internet for those with a lack of foresight. But what does...
If people are a company’s most important asset, the most successful firms will be those that are able to generate the largest possible returns from those resources. Increasing productivity is one way to do that but an even more valuable method is to mine team members for ideas. Tap into your team’s thoughts and you might well find that your firm, however small, already has what it takes to zoom...
Recent Comments