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Inspiring designers with unique insights on mindset, mindfulness, resilience, and personal growth to help them thrive in life and work so they can realize their full creative potential.

💎 Friday Gems

💎 Friday Gems #13 (Moral Imaginations, Creative Grit, Warm Data)

Three gems of ideas to unleash your potential!

Apr 15, 2023

The past few weeks have been a blur for me at work because of the planning and taking part in a design sprint. For me, this was a great introduction to this common design thinking activity. On the one side, I loved the fact that we could go from an idea to a tested prototype in one week and come up with many great ideas. On the flip side, what I didn’t like so much were the time constraints of the ideation and sketching exercises. There just wasn’t enough time to explore ideas fully and to give the creative process the time it needed to produce even better results. This is the common theme across the gems I share with you this week.

Imagination, creativity, and contextual information, which are the key parts of any creative endeavor.

Let me know if any of the gems resonate. I love hearing from you! 💜

💎 The Impossible Train Story - Moral Imaginations

To survive in this world, we often numb ourselves and our perception to what is wrong such as food insecurity, poverty, social injustice, and homelessness. We think these situations are just how things are, and there is not much we can do to end them. Moral imagination is the process of using our collective imagination in a rigorous way to chart a path toward a world we want to live in and the people we want to be.

One of the exercises used to help participants break out of current-day constraints, thought processes, and worn-down neural pathways to a situation is The Impossible Train Story.

"The story, narration, visuals and sounds build up a sensory experience of a portal into a metaphoric world not far away from this one — where a group of human beings have to make a decision on what to do next with their future after a Great Pause."
- Phoebe Tickell, creator of Moral Imaginations.

The Impossible Train Story - a must-watch four-minute video

💎 Creative Grit

There is another model of creativity that we may be ignoring, which is persistence. If we are always rushing to get to the next step, next phase, or next report, we can easily miss out on the opportunity to stay with a problem to come up with unique and creative solutions that are not obvious or surface level.

In her article, The Benefits of "Creative Grit"

Annie Murphy Paul

provides the example of painter Franz Kline and how he used persistence in his creative process to push past the obvious ideas to arrive at pieces that truly spoke to him. Annie shares research being done in the creative field to help us understand the power of persistence and shares steps you can take to make persistence work for you in your creative process.

So the next time you think you have drained the well of creative ideas when you are sketching, ideating, and brainstorming, keep going and give your mind the time it needs to produce more unique and creative ideas.

Science of Creativity

The Benefits of "Creative Grit"

When the painter Franz Kline was a young artist living in New York City, he adopted a very particular way of working: He used black ink on white paper to produce study after study, employing just a few bold lines and shapes. He made so many of these preparatory sketches that he resorted to using pages torn from a telephone book—a material that was abund…

5 months ago · 75 likes · 21 comments · Annie Murphy Paul

💎 Warm Data

Quantitative data is needed to help us act and make decisions. However, objectivity and preciseness can make it easy to be taken out of context, and context is key to helping make sense of information.

Warm Data is the idea of looking at the quantitative data plus the context of the data. When we look at the context around the information, we can see the relationships, connections, dependencies, and inter-dependencies, effects, and causes between other types of information within a system to help us get a better sense of information holistically.

Warm Data illustrates vital relationships between many parts of a system. For example, to understand a family, one must understand not only the family members but also the relationships between them, that is, the warm data.

In this video, writer, filmmaker, and educator Nora Bateson, who coined the term "Warm Data," explains how the idea of Warm Data came to be.

The next time you are presented with quantitative data, make sure warm data is being considered to provide a more holistic view.

Let me know in the comments if any of the gems resonate with you. I always love hearing from you.💜

Thanks for reading, and have a fantastic weekend!

Rizwan