(bad) seeds of thought about inspiration

Some of the lyrics from the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song, (I'll love you till) The end of the world.

Some things we plan
We sit and we invent and we plot and cook up
Others are works of inspiration, of poetry
And it was this genius hand that pushed me 

This is how creativity and inspiration appear to me these days. That genius hand can start pushing any time now...

RIP Csikszentmihalyi

 From University of Chicago.

As a scholar, he is best known for creating flow theory—a state of being in which people become so immersed in the joy of their work or activity “that nothing else seems to matter.” He outlined the theory in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, a seminal 1990 book that influenced leaders from politics to sports.

“Mike had a genius for creating simple, generative models of flow, creativity and aesthetic experience, and then unfolding their implications in his writings; the impact of his ideas has been remarkably broad,” said Jeanne Nakamura, an associate professor at Claremont Graduate University, where Csikszentmihalyi taught after retiring from UChicago in 1999.

Nakamura also wrote:

“He was the best example of the things that he studied about the life well lived.”

Which suggests to me that in studying FLOW, he also lived it.

Wikipedia also has an entry about him, of course.

I first learned of his death from Boingboing.

Hi there. Already thinking about Christmas

I want to make a wind up toy where when you turn a crank, the sleigh and reindeer rock up and down as if surfing the wind and clouds.

I worked out the basics here.

And this is where I am today.

I used the paper to measure how much room I will need for the base. More than  two feet! It is a big prototype!

And what would it look like with a cute dinosaur in Rudolph's position?

I can't recall what the schematic calls for, but I will use a 2X4 for the base, straightened and re-curled paperclips to hold the crank shaft and the crankshaft itself will be a straightened and refolded coat hanger.
 

Still alive and thinking about creativity

 Although the pandemic is ongoing, I have been busy at work, even managing some creative activities. I have on occasion been wildly creative and also lucky with my creating but mostly just doing my job.

Still, here is an interesting article about curiosity. 5 Dimensions of curiosity.

This sounds a little like how my own blog started but in a more serious way:

For over 20 years, I have been studying curiosity. I didn't plan to be a curiosity researcher. 

The following five categories are well explained at the link - I have removed the explanations to encourage your reading the original material:

1. Joyous Exploration. 

2. Deprivation Sensitivity. 

3. Stress Tolerance. 

4. Social Curiosity. 

5. Thrill Seeking.

4 types of curious people (again, details removed):

1. The Fascinated:

2. Problem Solvers: 

3. Empathizers: 

4. Avoiders: 

and

We found overt social curiosity to be linked to healthy psychological outcomes including open-mindedness, extraversion, agreeableness, low negative emotionality, interpersonal competencies, and low levels of loneliness. With covert social curiosity, information is gathered by surreptitious routes such as gossiping, snooping, spying, and other indirect means of discovering what other people are like. Covert social curiosity was linked to much less adaptive psychological outcomes such as a motivation to avoid errors and mistakes in the workplace, and a tendency to complain to friends, family, and co-workers.

The discussion here on curiosity is also interesting.

Via Kottke.

Fighting CoVID at Work

At least playing at fighting CoVID anyway.

First, a Christmas craft, a way to scent drawers or closets. The result looked surprising like abstract images of the virus.

And that led eventually to adapting a game to play at beating up the virus.

For recreationists, this is a game I adapted for Long Term Care Residents. Some key points here are the limited mobility of my residents and reducing the amount of work I need to put into actually running the activity. So as my pictures show, the game is called Balloon Tennis and the residents are in a circle around a balloon tethered to the ceiling. They smash at it and it never travels fast enough to harm anyone and never needs to be picked up by me when it goes over the shoulder of a player. The balloon has a little water in it to give a little more weight.

So first I wrote "CoVID" on the balloon and glued a few 'spike proteins'.

I hung it from the ceiling.

I was struck by the idea of performance art and if we were beating the virus, how would we do it? Well, by using Vaccines, Masks, Hand Washing and Social Distancing of course.

And so my residents beat the heck out of CoVID that day. And since we have been lucky and careful, we don't have actual cases of the disease at our Home to make the game morbid.