TEDx: On Biologically Inspired Design for Education

Inspired by a talk in one of my classes today, I was looking for stuff on biologically inspired design, and this is what I found: A TEDx talk by a Georgia Tech professor.

Inspirations for creativity and design are drawn from nature quite often, and this is a talk on bio-inspired design, education, and where the two meet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMlvUJ9_GSk

Filtered Creativity

By now, probably everyone has heard about Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram. Whether or not adding filters to an image counts as creativity (I would vote not) aside, this acquisition shows just how much the movers and shakers of technology are pushing and valuing content creation. It’s hard to read a tech blog nowadays without reading an article that is in some way championing products that encourage mass-creation of content. Many companies are trying to do for video what Instagram did for pictures.

One company, Socialcam, went from 1.5M monthly users to 9M in just two days (http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/150768931647055-socialcam). So maybe the days aren’t long until our facebook feeds are filled with Sepia videos as well as pictures. As I instinctively recoil from this “creative” media, it makes me think back to the beginning of the semester when we discussed the similarities and differences between creativity and art. I don’t have any answers to that debate, but it’s an interesting thing to think about as we dive deeper into the age of having easy mediums of creativity right at our fingertips.

A creativity tool for developers, sort of

I think this website, http://www.mashape.com/, has a really cool idea. It’s an API marketplace for developers that will wrap a bunch of APIs into a single SDK for developers to use. So, it lets developers use lego-esque pieces of code to build something without having to worry about the details of every little thing. To me, that seems like a great way to boost creativity in coding. Also, just browsing through all the weird APIs that this site has available could lead to really odd, creative projects involving them.

Also, they have a pretty cool video explanation of their company: http://vimeo.com/23942256

An attempt to define creativity!

Creativity and it’s definition varies for each one of us!Following are some  interesting definitions of creativity according to students of California State University I found :

-Creativity doesn’t have a definition per se. Once you try to define it, it loses it splendor. Creativity is anything that can be created, even if it is structured, logical, etc. Art it art if you think it is.

-Creativity is your personality. It is putting yourself and your own touch into everything that you do. Creativity in uniqueness.

-Creativity means being able to come up with your own clever ideas.

-Creativity is not common among people. It is the ability to do or create something that others find intriguing.

-Creativity is engaging in activity that is not learned from a book. It is doing something that you enjoy and that you are the author of – such as an original song or work of art.

-Creativity is the ability to think freely without placing any limilations or restrictions on oneself.

-Creativity is different every time. It is blood rushing to your brain exciting you to be different.

-Creativity is opening up your mind to new things by experimenting with them.

-Creativity is the chi and soul to one’s will – with no control and no boundaries.

For me, creativity is the freedom to do what I want to do and the way I want to do it ! It is about not putting too much emphasis on what others would like but doing what I love no matter how silly it might be . 🙂

What about you guys??

 

 

Something new, never borrowed?

You can show that given a random card shuffle, it is likely that the configuration has never seen in the history of the world. Taking the Poisson distribution over 52! possible events means that every single time you shuffle the deck, it is very likely that the configuration is the first time it has ever occurred in history.

Is that not something new? An artist that uses shuffled cards bring a degree of randomness that is completely new to this universe. Where is the borrowed element?