decide what problem is worth working on

There's a creative act in trying to decide what problem is worth working on in the first place.

Mike Antonucci, "Sparks Fly," Stanford Magazine, March/April 2011, alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=28380

we can adjust the sails

On one occasion President Monson said: “We … can choose to have a positive attitude. We can’t direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails. In other words, we can choose to be happy and positive, regardless of what comes our way.”

Thomas Monson, “Messages of Inspiration from President Monson,” Church News, 2 Sep 2012 as quoted in William Walker, "Our Prophet Thomas S Monson," CES Devotional, 5 May 2013,
www.lds.org/broadcasts/article/ces-devotionals/2013/01/our-prophet-thomas-s-monson.

he paid more attention to the customers than they paid to themselves

Let’s start with Henry Ford. If he had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse, because they knew they had a problem that a horse seemed to solve (transportation), and they could only think in terms of what they already knew (a horse, but faster). Did Ford really ignore his customers? Not really. He just understood their underlying need better than they did. He realized that what they really needed was not a horse per se, but convenient, affordable transportation. So he threw out the assumptions, reframed the problem at a deeper level, and found a way to bring an emerging product category to the masses.

It’s not that he didn’t pay attention to the customers, but that he paid more attention to the customers than they paid to themselves.

Peter Lewis, "Looking Past the Horse," Midium.com, 3 Aug 2013,
medium.com/editors-picks/44bda7299a28.

BBQ

"When I'm feeling good, I want barbecue. And when I'm feeling bad, I just want barbecue more."

Jason Sheehan, "There Is No Such Thing as Too Much Barbecue," This I Believe, npr.org, 29 May 2006, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4827993.

In-progress

In-progress work is uncomfortable, it shows more open questions than answers; and “uncertainty”, as Paul Soulellis wrote in The Manual, “runs counter to how we’re trained to articulate our design values. We’re taught to express clearly and certainly”, but in-progress work is usually not clear yet, craft is messy and dirty, and sometimes you hit a dead end. Facing this is unsettling — maybe especially so for a generation of designers raised with the shiny precision of computers. We love that precision, even if deep down we know that it’s often a lie. The precise numbers of computers can make our work look like we’ve found answers when really all we have are questions, and the only truth we know is vague.

Nina Stössinger, "Sketching Out of My Comfort Zone: A Type Design Experiment," typographica.org, 27 May 2013
typographica.org/reports/sketching-out-of-my-comfort-zone-a-type-design-experiment/ via Robb Perry.

Daring Greatly

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly... who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly."

- Theodore Roosevelt

Found while looking at the Amazon description of
Daring Greatly.

simplicity & complexity

Jared M. Spool
@jmspool
Before you can design for simplicity, you need to become immersed in the complexity.

11:08am · 14 Apr 13 · Twitter for iPhone

Peter Merholz
@peterme
@jmspool Sounds like the Steve Jobs quote (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/ff_stevejobs/), search for: "Fruit, an apple".

11:37am · 14 Apr 13 · TweetDeck

Even back then, Jobs described Apple in the terms he would use repeatedly over the years, as “an intersection between science and aesthetics.” When I suggested that he seemed to be striving for an almost Zen-like simplicity in his designs, he agreed, mentioning an early brochure with a single image of an apple against a white background.

“Fruit, an apple,” he said. “That simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. When you start looking at a problem, it seems really simple—because you don’t understand its complexity. And your solutions are way too oversimplified, and they don’t work. Then you get into the problem and you see it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going and find the key underlying principle of the problem and sort of come full circle with a beautiful, elegant solution that works. And that’s what we wanted to do with Mac.”

Twitter and Steven Levy, "The Revolution According to Steve Jobs," Wired, 29 Nov 2011,
www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/ff_stevejobs/.

Creativity means that you try something new

Though absolutely harmonious with the studio's overall filmmaking values, [The Incredibles] was quite unlike the movies Pixar had made before—and that, as Catmull explained, was exactly the point. "We need to have variability, and we need to have people with different ideas. You can't keep repeating the old things. By definition, creativity means thay you try something new."

Karen Paik, To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios, Chronicle Books, 2007, p 249.

wrestling a vision into existence

In addition to the problems every filmmaker faces in wrestling a vision into existence, Docter was facing a web of pressures highly unusual fo a first-time director.

Karen Paik, To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios, Chronicle Books, 2007, p 186.

I just really like this description of the creative process - "wrestling a vision into existence." Io Infinity and Beyond is a great read about the creative process behind a movie and a company.

240 billion photos

DATA POINT: 240 BILLION

"In January, Facebook announced that it has 240 billion photos total. With Instagram, there are 40 million photos uploaded every day. Photos are becoming the default of communication."

- Loren Appin, director of growth, Pixable, an application that personalizes the photo-sharing experience

"Gannett, Airbnb, Pixable Weigh In On The Value Of Visual," Fast Company, 18 Mar 2013, www.fastcompany.com/magazine/174/gannett-airbnb-pixable.