Showing only Notes & Links tagged thinking wrong on art, design, creativity and, technology by Casey A. Gollan

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You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance… You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home and tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision each other’s interior workings and invisible aims?… The fact is that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you.

Philip Roth — American Pastoral

(via jenbee)

Notes on the Creative Process, Selfishness, Thinking Wrong, and the Education System

A relatively unedited excerpt from my notebook, 5/19/09.

Artists and designers, by the nature of their craft, are selfish. And that selfishness is necessary. Time spent dreaming, playing, napping, or lost in thought is essential to creativity.

The fact of the matter is that creative minds never really take vacations (Anne Pundyk), but always being in engaged in that serious play (Paula Scher) is what creates great ideas.

To do things the right way, the way you’re told, while not asking why, is relatively easy. I think that I struggle to think right, to just do what I’m told, to just get it over with, but to me those right ways are not right.

“Maybe it’s wrong-footed trying to fit people into the world, rather than trying to make the world a better place for people.” (Paul McHugh — from Brain Gain by Margaret Talbot — The New Yorker)

In public high schools today, thinking creatively, thinking wrong, means getting an F. Mediocre efficiency is prized and while actual effectiveness is naively ignored. In this flawed system, creativity is somewhat of a disability.