Is Twitter consuming too much of your time? Those 140 characters just too limiting to microblog your every move? Your solution just might be Flutter…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeLZCy-_m3s
Clever!
A month or two ago, I posted a column about landline use and my dismay at my family for ditching their home phones. Turns out they’re among the vast group of Americans going the same way. AP reports that one in three households in the U.S. is now mobile-only.
That’s likely in part due to economic conditions, and as a practical matter of dollars and cents, I get it. The under-30s boast even higher numbers of cell-only households. And poorer households are also likely to go mobile.
I still think the dynamic elements of communication — and the relationship building and heck, simple phone manners, that come from the anyone-can-answer landline — are lost in the cell only world. I’m not sure what we do to replace what we’re losing here, but the train has left the station. I’m not hopping on just yet.
Here’s the AP article:
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.aspx?feed=AP&date=20090506&id=9874977
And my original post:
http://creativetype.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/in-defense-of-land-lines/
I’ve written before about children and creativity and the surprise solutions kids can come up with when left with breathing room and a blank page. Recently, I’ve watched my daughter innovate (and paid attention to my own responses to the challenge), and I think there are some lessons for us grown-ups with regard to creative approaches.
The task was to invent something using at least two “simple machines” – which could be an inclined plane, a pulley, gears, wheel/axle, a wedge, etc. The first task was to think about what type of invention to create, and my daughter settled quickly on something like a marble run. With barely a glimmer of an idea in her mind, she got out the Kinex and began to construct.
As she built, she made decisions about next steps. She built the frame high enough and decided it needed a pulley at the top. The plan was to tie a cup to a string, fill the cup with marbles, and then hoist it to the top, where it would dump out the load. As she built this next piece, she decided the marbles needed a place to land. Watching her thought process here, it was easy to tell when a new idea struck – her eyes lit up and she had fiery energy to execute the solution she’d just thought up. We raided my son’s toilet paper tube collection (yes, he has an entire bag collected “just in case” he ever needs them!), and she cut them in half to create a marble run. Using some tape and yarn, she constructed a ramp that started underneath the pulley drop-off all the way to the base. Though the project isn’t completed yet, she’s excited about her invention, and now she’s setting about making it even better.
Creative types might do well to follow her lead:
1. Fear not, and just do it. A little planning is a good thing, but most of us labor over the planning and that stops us from taking action. Unless you’re building a suspension bridge, you don’t need to have it all mapped out before you start. Another approach? Just begin, and don’t be afraid about making a wrong move.
2. Take one step at a time. After all, you can’t finish a project all at once; it takes multiple steps, so just start moving ahead.
3. Go with it. If you’re excited about a particular direction, go with it. There is probably some gold there, even if you end up abandoning the idea later. Get the bones down, and you can fill in the detail later. Curiosity is one of the creative’s best tools.
4. Step back, assess, and adjust course as needed. Plenty of us become paralyzed by making it “perfect” when really, we just need it to be functional.
5. Play. When all else fails, get out the toys and just play. The freedom of play leads to creative license you can’t imagine if you’re trying to force a solution before you step out of the box.
This last one is probably the biggest lesson: If you’re not having fun, how can you possibly be creative?
