Information Visualization

I'd like to tell you a story and in fact show  you a video of a morning that I had recently. This is to give an example in practice of several of  the creativity techniques, but also the way about one organizes one's time and one's processes and activities in life in order to emphasize and to encourage creativity.

What I'm going to do first of all is show you a video of my morning, and we're going to start with getting up in the morning and move through for about the first hour or so of a morning a short while ago. So, here's the video and I hope – well, we'll talk through it at the end so we can talk through some of the lessons that come out of it. Do you ever get that thing when you wake up in the morning and something's been going round your head?

This morning it was all about creativity and time management for creativity. Not that I've been dreaming about it all night, but it's been something I've been thinking about for the last few days. And in that bit between first waking and when I actually turned on the light thought  about so much in just those few short minutes. It probably happens to you in the shower as well; it certainly does to me.

Five minutes in the shower in morning; my mind's blank, and suddenly all these ideas flow in. And from those five minutes in the shower, I'll often go out and spend perhaps half an hour writing up initially onto bits of paper what I've been thinking of, and then the rest of the day typing it. All of that just because of a few drops of water. Washing up is another one of those times when your mind is wandering.

It doesn't have anything particularly to do, and ideas suddenly pop up; things that you thought it before. It's not that the water magically generates the ideas. They're things that have been in your head, but you have time to both let them meander, also sometimes take a step back – you might have been stuck on something, wondering about a problem,

and then suddenly you go from a distance and it all goes away. So, the day-to-day things are sometimes the best things to turn to when you want to have something fresh to think about. So, what we'll do now is just talk you through some of the things I did – and this is just my process – everybody will be different – from this morning. So, I woke up, perhaps spent five, ten minutes before I turned the light on.

And then I started to write notes, and this is them: scrap paper, notes on the back, thoughts about taking a video in the shower, all sorts of things. I write on paper first because I find if I go straight to the computer, I start to elaborate things too much, and by the time I've elaborated the first  idea, I've forgotten the rest. So, this way I capture on paper – and also on paper you can draw little lines, little sketches I find far more

easily than I can on-screen. Some people find it easy to use certain tools on-screen as well. Then I typed it all up. There's a Word document here. I just typed as quickly and as straightforwardly as I possibly could what I'd written down. And then what I've done – it's something I've been doing comparatively recently – is transferred that  into PowerPoint slides. Now, this sounds terrible: 'death by PowerPoint' – but what I find with that is I can, per page so they're quite small and cut out

the individual slides. I'll just cut out one for you now. So, I cut them out and make small slides. Now the advantage of these slides is they're  small enough that I can see a lot at once. Now, I won't show you these ones; I'll put those away. But I'll bring out some that I did a while back for a book chapter I was doing. I went through the same process – I sort of outlined, having had the ideas, in text, and then...

made the PowerPoint slide, and here there was never a presentation; there was no video. There was no presentation I went through – this was purely in the end to write a chapter; cut them out, was able to sort them around, put them into little clumps, put annotations on ones, perhaps cross bits out, sometimes just cut out a blank piece of paper  and write a new topic.

Once I was sort of satisfied they were in the right sort of order, tidy them up, put them into little folds, write something on them, and suddenly I have my chapter ready to write. But you notice what I'm trying to do here is to make the maximum use of the *fluid creative thinking* and yet also then translate that and make it into something that's more structured. And this is true whether it's producing a piece of writing, producing a presentation or video,

or producing some software. I hope that wasn't too shocking for you seeing me waking up in the morning! We had some real fun making this video, my wife and I; so, I hope you enjoyed the few minutes of it. What I want to do now is just talk you through those stages, and this is literally about an hour, an hour and a half in a morning and the way things worked through them. So, let's start at the beginning with me waking up. So, you saw me waking up

with ideas buzzing around my head. It  doesn't happen every morning, I should emphasize. This does happen relatively often, but as I said, not every morning. So, okay, I'm waking up – what about waking up? Some lessons are here about what's called  *incubation*. And I'll talk more about that in some other videos. But incubation is that idea that sometimes things have to *settle into your head* in order for *ideas to come* out.  You might have been thinking about something. Here, the whole stuff was about time-managing creativity.

These are thoughts that have gone on in my head for years, some written down, some not. The question was how to present them for you in videos. So, those had been going in my head, but they needed working. And often when you're relaxed, and sleeping can help that process. The other thing about it – one is, the *ideas came when I awoke*, but crucially also is *being ready to accept creative thoughts and ideas when they happen*.

Don't try and make them happen – I mean, sometimes you have to do that, to be honest. But when they are, *grab them* – don't let them go! So, that's critical there. Then we have two parts of it. Part of it was about going to shower in the morning – and I hope not too shocking, seeing my soggy, still tired eyes here! And also about washing up. So, these are day-to-day activities.

They are things that *occupy your mind* in the sense you have to do something, but they *don't fill your mind with stuff*. They're blank stages, mind-wandering stages. There are lots of these: deliberately going for a walk might do this for you. Sometimes just sitting down with a cup of coffee or a cup of tea and doing nothing. There are various times. And these mind-wandering times are often incredibly productive.

If you go to them thinking 'I'm going to have a productive shower!', you probably won't. But the very act of having a shower or washing-up, it means again, some of those thoughts that have been pushing into your head, you've been thinking over, start to settle out, and often interesting thoughts come out of it. As for the pressure, the fact that there's *no pressure is absolutely crucial*. Then we went on from these stages which were  more of these open mind stages,

which was more about getting new thoughts together, to a slightly more structured phase. So, I went to my desk – and we'll talk more about that; that's a critical change as well – and *wrote things down*. So, crucially if you've had something that's come into your head, get it out. Unless you're – I mean, people are different and a crucial thing I think I've said before is:

we're all different; we have different ways of dealing with this. But get things out; *get them out of your head as fast as possible into some recorded form*. Otherwise, you might just lose them. I also talked about being *careful* – while I was actually doing the video, about been careful about *premature elaboration*. So, that's taking the nub of an idea and expanding it. Here, it was about these videos and about moving from the idea of something to actually the words and the details of it.

But this might be true of designing a new logo for a company. It might be about some programming nitty-bit issue in user interface programming. It might be a user experience issue – how do you design something? But make sure you *capture it as quickly as you can*, before you forget it. Now, the reason for not elaborating too early is largely because if you get stuck in elaboration, you often forget the rest of stuff. So, get them *captured*.

Then you can afford to elaborate. Now, I did say I didn't elaborate that much when I went from paper to text or to PowerPoint, but actually that is often a place where I start to do that elaboration process. But I've already got stuff scribbled down on paper. Now, for *me*, I mentioned that I found paper better for this. A lot of people do. There's lots of evidence that when we go electronic, we move into a

very much more detailed mode, rather than a sort of overview mode. But it does depend on the individual; it depends on the way you work; it depends on the tools you've got. So, whether it's paper or whether it's screen, it's thinking about *making sure that you don't lose that flow*. You notice too I wrote things down. And, again, if you're really good at – perhaps you use one of those screens and you sort of write everything with your fingers, and it all comes out great. But I was doing lines and diagrams and things like that. Not, again, I wasn't elaborating heavily,

but sort of mind-mappy-type things, not just the words. Then I cut stuff out. And actually, I haven't got any small ones here; I should have ones. I mean, I've got a big picture of a slide here – but I cut things out into small slides. A number of reasons for that – I talked about some of them as I was doing the video. Partly it's about *making these abstract ideas concrete, physical*

– things I can hold and look at; literally making them objects. So, they went from being ideas in my head, to written on paper, to in the machine, to now cut out so that I can play with them. The crucial thing about my little cutouts – and again it varies on the kind of work you're doing – but for this purpose, they're small enough that I can have a lot on my table at once and get an idea of the general overview of stuff, so it's that *overview view*.

But also I can pick them up and look at them. This is a classic from information visualization: *overview and detail* – your eyes just do it to physical things because we're able to make much more rapid changes by either picking something up or just focusing on it, than we can by manipulating things on screen. So, again, it's not that there aren't tools that might help you. You might prefer to use something like a mind-mapping tool that allows you to perhaps expand a node and close it and then play with the nodes on-screen:

different ways. But it's about getting these processes. Then I *sorted* things. And, again, the fact that they're these small little notes helps me to sort them because they're small enough that I can get a lot on the table at once, so I can do it, but big enough that I can see what they are. So, I'm getting that overview; I'm starting to – I can shuffle things around without making strong commitments. If I'm reordering, say, an outline in Word or if I'm reordering slides in PowerPoint,

you're making it explicit – 'this goes here'. On the table, you're doing something that's more *fluid*; 'this sort of goes here'. And you might sometimes put something halfway between; you might – you know – have a general clumpiness over here, without necessarily specifying the exact order. So, that ability to have something that's flexible and yet allows you to create some structure. So, you notice I'm using the *two-dimensional space* a lot.

I'm using the *physicality* of these things. Again, it's not that there aren't digital tools that might help you with these. And it was very easy for me to add extra things to those paper cutouts, add whole new ones or annotate them. And then, finally, there was that *putting them into little piles and folding them over*. And what that's doing is taking – I've done a structuring job, and creating even more overview in a sense I'm putting things together; I did make a commitment;

I've made a commitment that my pile is now a unit that's perhaps going to become a set of videos or set a slides, a chapter in a book, whatever it is that you're organizing. But also, by putting the *label* on, that then becomes a single unit that I can look at with others. So, I can perhaps then do that large-scale structuring that says, 'Well, I think that group probably belongs in front of that group.' So, again, a lot of this is about giving yourself the ability to

*control the material, rather than the material control you*. Finally, I'm going to talk about the *overall process*. So, we've looked at the single stages during the day. First of all, a lot of the early stages are trying to make the most of what you can think of as *fluid creativity*: that idea is generating, the divergent stage.

Putting yourself or *being aware and ready to listen*  during the times when that's likely to happen. And it tends to be these mind-wandering moments; it tends to be in the shower, waking up, washing dishes, going for a walk, going for a run if you're more of a runner, cycling – whatever you do; not watching the television, not social media, but things that give you that ability to be open. So, *making the most of those when they happen*;

then *rapidly capturing*, and trying to reduce any barrier to capturing those ideas, making as fluid, as simple as possible. *The desire for perfection often gets in the way.* So, it's about making it *low commitment*, so as I write the things down I'm not saying this is the order they belong in, because later on I know I'm going to reorder them. So, by knowing I'm going to have a stage later, I can be less committed and therefore

more fluid, more rapid, less worried – all of these things block any sort of creative activity. The other thing you noticed – now, this varies from time to time, from project to project, but this was a very bottom-up process. Now, sometimes you have a top-down process where you have an overall structure and you're trying to fill in gaps. This was one where I had lots of things and wasn't quite sure how to put them together. And, again, the way in which you process things will vary.

So, the things I was doing that morning were much more about individual ideas sparking off and then how to build those together into something with coherence. There'll be other projects where actually the  overall structure is a clearer one and it's a finer-scale one you want. Although actually what I tend to do is repeat a process that's not vastly dissimilar to this for each stage down, so I sort of do something that's between a bottom-up and top-down; I'm sure most processes are. Another thing – the *transcription*; so, there was the writing down, but also once I've written things

on paper, transcribing them to a computer  is a non-creative process. It's not quite the same as having a shower, where your mind is just doing anything. I've got to be typing these words, but I'm doing something that's a relatively mundane, repetitive or easy-to-do task, but is related and is tied into the thought. So, I'm transcribing the things that I want to think about. So, it's both something – it's a bit like being in a shower, but being in a shower that's about the topic.

Again, that cutting out is doing the same: I'm cutting out slides, I'm doing a mechanical process – *physical processes are very good for creativity*. They make all sorts of nice things flow through your brain; you can get the neuroscience of this, but you sort of get all these nice neurotransmitters flying around when you do physical processes. But it's not just a random physical process; it's one where while I'm cutting out, I'm constantly seeing those ideas and seeing the individual one.

So, when I come to do the structuring my mind is already doing that. And the other thing is I started off in my bed, waking up; I moved to the shower; I was washing up, went into the office, sitting down at a desk. Different physical spaces often encourage different modes of thought; and, again, being aware of that. *For you, they're likely to be different ones.* Sometimes, it might be a formal situation, informal ones. You might have all sorts of different situations, but

understanding, beginning to get that sense in yourself that if you want to do a certain sort of activity maybe by doing this – it might be that you have a laptop for certain things you do and a desktop computer for others. So, it might be about the devices you use; it might be about the physical locations, all sorts of things. Even changing your t-shirt, but changing things and becoming aware for yourself of where those changes are likely to happen,

because again – I've said it several times; I'll say it once more – *we're all different*. So, I've given you a snapshot of a day or a portion of the beginning of a day in my life with the things that helped me to function. The things that help you to function  will be different; so, part of it, some of these might be good things to learn for yourself – you might find they're useful. But part of your journey of creativity is learning what works for you and makes you the best possible person.