Creativity

The Making of a Creative Worldview

AI and I: The Age of Artificial Creativity

A NessLabs essay on what AI creative tools mean for human creativity and knowledge work — arguing that AI doesn't replace creativity but reshapes what creative work consists of. Published at the start of the generative AI wave in late 2022.

DeepDream: How Alexander Mordvintsev Excavated the Computer's Hidden Layers

The story behind Google's DeepDream — how researcher Alexander Mordvintsev discovered that running gradient ascent on a convolutional network's hidden layers produces psychedelic imagery that reveals what features the network learned. A landmark moment in neural network interpretability.

Organic Towns from Square Tiles — Oskar Stålberg at IndieCade 2019

Oskar Stålberg's IndieCade 2019 talk on generating organic-looking towns from square tiles using a constraint-propagation algorithm. A beautiful demonstration of how simple local rules produce complex emergent structure.

Data as Paint, and the Rise of the Data Artist

SYS-CON piece arguing data is the new paint — that a new class of 'data artists' is emerging who use datasets as creative raw material rather than purely analytical input. An early articulation of data as a creative medium.

Finding Ideas For Your Next Project

Nathan Barry's guide to finding project ideas — specifically for designers and developers who want to build products. The advice: find problems you already have, look at intersections of your skills, and ship small things to learn fast.

Work, Life, and Side Projects

Smashing Magazine piece on maintaining side projects alongside full-time work — why they matter for motivation and growth, and how to protect the time and mental energy they require. Written at the beginning of the indie hacker/maker cultural wave that peaked around 2015-2018.

How Serial Innovators Find the Best Problems to Solve

Fast Company on how serial innovators identify which problems to work on — drawing on research by Claudio Feser and others showing that the problem selection step is where great innovations diverge from incremental ones.

This Is Your Brain on Jazz: MRI Study of Spontaneity and Creativity

A Johns Hopkins fMRI study of jazz improvisation found that musicians deactivate their self-monitoring prefrontal cortex and activate the self-expression region during improvisation. Empirical support for the idea that creative flow requires disabling your inner critic.

Steve Jobs Was Right to 'Steal,' and Beer Is Inspiring

PandoDaily defending Jobs' famous 'good artists copy, great artists steal' philosophy — arguing that creative theft (synthesis and transformation, not copying) is a feature of great design and product thinking. The beer angle was about how informal settings unlock creative thinking.

Everything is a Remix Part 4

Kirby Ferguson's 'Everything is a Remix Part 4' — the final episode arguing that copyright law has been captured by corporations to restrict rather than enable creativity, inverting its constitutional purpose. Pairs with Jobs's 'good artists borrow, great artists steal' as a defense of creative recombination.