Creativity, Communication, and Teaching

Following Olin faculty on Twitter is fun because you get access to a slow but manageable trickle of interesting undergrads, one of whom is @browley20, who wrote the following:

http://brettrowley.blogspot.com/2012/03/importance-of-language.html

... which is awesome, and which I will proceed to agree with and rebut simultaneously, eventually fading into a bit of a rant about approaching creativity from an analytical mindset.

Some primers:

• UOCD is User-Oriented Collaborative Design. It started as Olin students' first contact with the creative process (needfinding, prototyping, evaluation, iteration), is team-based, and uses a combination of design reviews and journaling to effect evaluation.
  
• Olin is a tiny, tiny college (68 were in my graduating class) that only offers engineering degrees. It strives for curriculum innovation and to ground students in entrepreneurship, humanities, philanthropy, and design as well as technical topics. Graduates tend towards project management, startups, or graduate school: anywhere requiring interdisciplinary prowess.
  
• Early on, Olin students had a huge hand in the design and running of the school. This has tapered off since the inaugural class graduated in 2006, but since our 5-yr reunion last year there's been some rekindling of the urge to college-build among current students.
  
• Since Olin I have dropped out of a robotics PhD program, worked for a few different labs at CMU, and am slowly working through CMU's MHCI (Human-Computer Interaction) program part-time, where I've been focusing on design, creativity, and education.
  

( Read on... )

Creative people have to push the boundaries of society's comfort zone. If we knew what it felt like, someone would've been there before, and it wouldn't be outside our comfort zone. There's no way to tell someone how to get there, aside from having them try over and over again, each time a little harder, each time in a different direction. What's hard enough? You tell me. I don't know. You're the first person who will ever have been there.

It's like trying to argue with a Zen monk. Sometimes you have to just say "Yes" to everything with joy and enthusiasm and see what happens.