Already $178 donated for the biggest best most beautiful public art piece New York will see this year! Student-built! You can be next! Please contribute to this awesome project! See this morning’s post.

My next big beautiful public art piece will be with my Parsons class in Union Square. You can help make New York more beautiful, give people something to enjoy in their busy days, help students learn and build experience. Visit the project’s Kickstarter page and donate! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/492851406/big-beautiful-public-art-by-parsons-class-in-union About this project: We are 18 young talented art students and 2 professors in a class together at Parsons The New School of[…] Keep reading →

Martha Graham, one of the great artists of the twentieth century — Picasso-level stature and influence in her field — entered my life late, in my 30s, when recording Julliard dancers for my art at Lincoln Center. They were perfect people to learn from, dancers actively learning her, describing a “Martha Graham revolution” I’d never heard of before. I’d feel bad about learning about her so late, but since then[…] Keep reading →

I’ve written about mindmaps recently and my upcoming creativity talk on April 10. I thought I’d share the draft mindmap I’ve prepared so far for the talk. Freemind lets me export to a flash-based mindmap that you can navigate. You can’t edit it or see how I edit it to see how fun, useful, and effective it is, but you can see the output. It’s an incomplete draft — too[…] Keep reading →

I’m speaking on creativity at the next Fred Talk, April 10. Please come! A longtime friend emailed me after she went to the last one (I was out of town) telling me my talk was announced. Fred talks are do-it-yourself Ted talks with the slogan “Your friends’ ideas worth spreading.” Who says you need some huge conference for thousands of people that costs lots of money? You probably learned more[…] Keep reading →

Mindmaps and mindmapping software are awesome! I rarely like using computers for what I can use paper and pencil, but mindmaps and mindmapping software help organize complex ideas better. They’re simple, effective, and, best of all, fun. I can only speak for the software I use, Freemind. Besides basic mindmapping functionality, it has some bells and whistles but I haven’t used them yet. It’s also free software that runs on[…] Keep reading →

April 5 and 7, 6-10pm at the New York Academy of Sciences I will be giving my seminar on Leadership and Personal Success — the best seminar you’ll ever attend. It’s similar to the leadership seminar at Columbia Business School in December, but more science-y and less business-y. Here’s the background from the NYAS web page (where you can register): Leadership and personal success through self-awareness and emotional intelligence are[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on creativity. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] I haven’t gone into any detail about Altshuller’s 40 principles. The main reason is I found that others already have and did a great job, so I’ll just link to them. The other reason[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on creativity. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] Here are some basics to TRIZ. After the basics, I’ll interpret them. After examining all those patents, Altshuller and his team found that about 1,500 generalized solutions described all the specific solutions. Even simpler,[…] Keep reading →