The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in art, business, economics, innovation, creativity, history, sociology, invention, technology, cultural studies, and related subjects.

Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways is by Professor Sarah Stein Greenberg of the Stanford d.school, California, the United States of America.

The TU Library collection includes many other books about different aspects of creativity.

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, commonly known as the d.school, is a design thinking institute based at Stanford University.

Among products launched from the Institute are the Embrace blanket, a low-cost alternative to neonatal incubators and the d.light, a solar-powered LED light now in use in some rural communities in the developing world.

The publisher’s description reads:

In an era of ambiguous, messy problems—as well as extraordinary opportunities for positive change—it’s vital to have both an inquisitive mind and the ability to act with intention. Creative Acts for Curious People is filled with ways to build those skills with resilience, care, and confidence.

At Stanford University’s world-renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka “the d.school,” students and faculty, experts and seekers bring together diverse perspectives to tackle ambitious projects; this book contains the experiences designed to help them do it. A provocative and highly visual companion, it’s a definitive resource for people who aim to draw on their curiosity and creativity in the face of uncertainty. Teeming with ideas about discovery, learning, and leading the way through unknown creative territory, Creative Acts for Curious People includes memorable stories and more than eighty innovative exercises.

Curated by executive director Sarah Stein Greenberg, after being honed in the classrooms of the d.school, these exercises originated in some of the world’s most inventive and unconventional minds, including those of d.school and IDEO founder David M. Kelley, ReadyMade magazine founder Grace Hawthorne, innovative choreographer Aleta Hayes, Google chief innovation evangelist Frederik G. Pferdt, and many more.

To bring fresh approaches to any challenge–world changing or close to home–you can draw on exercises such as Expert Eyes to hone observation skills, How to Talk to Strangers to foster understanding, and Designing Tools for Teams to build creative leadership. The activities are at once lighthearted, surprising, tough, and impactful–and reveal how the hidden dynamics of design can drive more vibrant ways of making, feeling, exploring, experimenting, and collaborating at work and in life. This book will help you develop the behaviors and deepen the mindsets that can turn your curiosity into ideas, and your ideas into action.

An excerpt from the book:

Judgment is a vital yet frequently misused capacity when it comes to creative work. It’s often applied too early in a creative process, which cuts off great potential ideas before they can bloom, or too late, which results in subpar or even harmful work getting out into the world.

You are already skilled at a kind of blunt-force judgment; rapidly evaluating a situation or experience for threats or opportunity is hard-wired into your brain to keep you safe. This assignment helps you take advantage of your instinct to judge and channels it into a productive form for creative work called “critique.”

How do you make your judgments more deliberate? Most people have strong instincts or feelings about what constitutes “good” when it comes to design, but they don’t take time to think about what “good” actually means. When you react to work and judge yourself or others based on hidden criteria that you have not exposed or defined, you’re more likely to make idiosyncratic or biased decisions. Part of being deliberate in this case is sharpening your definition of good, which helps you hold yourself and others to a high standard of work.

Engaging in critique means you periodically take an active stance of evaluation for the purpose of improving the work. Critique should happen not just once, but at specific moments throughout any creative process. (This also means critique should not happen all the time.) Knowing that you have set aside a specific time and approach for critique frees you up to have an exploratory, nonjudgmental mindset at other times. This method is the essential component to working in an iterative way: each time you pause to critique, you start a new cycle and take your work not just to the next part of your process, but also to a higher level. […]

First, everyone in the critique group needs to bring something for feedback. Or you need to have multiple things to share with the group. For example, perhaps everyone produced a statement of direction for a given project or created initial concept sketches showing what they might build into early prototypes and then test. You’ll be able to use the variation across a similar set to help the group figure out what “good” looks like.

Post images (or the work itself) up on a wall. Identify each with a number on a sticky note.

To set the tone for the critique, say, “Imagine that everyone else here is from Mars, where there’s no ownership of individual work, no authorship, no attribution. We’re all trying to understand what constitutes spectacular design in order to advance our own work.” This playful frame helps you get personal egos out of the way and encourages everyone to view the work objectively, rather than as an extension of self. The make-believe really helps, as does the effect of seeing your own work alongside everyone else’s.

Ask everyone to use their internal sense of enthusiasm as an initial indicator of quality for the work being critiqued. You might say any of the following:

When you see a particular direction of problem statement or concept, how enthusiastic do you feel about it?

If you could jump in and help with any of these, which ones would you actually devote your own energy to?

Which one of these do you wish you had come up with?

Ultimately, you’re trying to discern which of the projects transfer a sense of purpose and meaning to you. These are not traditional criteria, but they work well to help you cut straight to your instinctive judgment.

Give everyone a sticky note and explain that it represents a unit of energy. Write your initials on yours, along with the number of the work that energizes you the most, and ask everyone else to do the same. After all, you’re an independent, autonomous Martian licensed to work on whatever these humans have made! This is very different from how people work most of the time, where you may have to just put your head down and slog through what-ever project has been assigned to you. As a side benefit, placing your units of energy with the work that you resonate with most helps you uncover more about what really moves you, which you can later apply to your own work.

To avoid group-think, where a popular choice gains momentum and attracts all the units of energy, ask everyone to post their sticky notes next to their project of choice at the same time. Then step back and observe. You’ve made a heat map. You can see where the group’s collective energy lies: it’s right in front of you.

Pause to ask the group to reflect and start a critical discussion. There are usually some clear favorites that get most of the energy. But this isn’t voting: the whole point is to ask and understand why people responded favorably to what they selected.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)