Book
The Other Ideas: Art, Digital Products, and the Creative Mind is a book for individuals who want to thrive in uncertain conditions and use creative thinking to gain competitive advantage.
The book approaches uncertainty as a desirable, even necessary, ingredient in the creative process. We all have ideas. But what makes some ideas better than others? How do we figure out which ideas hold the most potential and which ones we can let go? How do we take an idea and transform it into a groundbreaking digital product?
With over a decade of experience in technology product development and classical art training, I share my own creative-thinking techniques, which fuse artistic perspectives with the demands of the tech industry. My original sketches accompany the text.
Published 1 April 2017. Paperback, 140 pages, ISBN-10 9659260628.
Topics include enduring uncertainty, pushing past the obvious, exploiting obstacles, fighting for inspiration, appreciating accidents, and using work itself as the holy grail of creativity.
The book comes from my own work as a product professional and from looking for ways to help peers, and myself, get better at it. It is short essays and drawings, meant to be used, not just read.
One habit from the book: when you are convinced an idea will work, imagine your initiative has already launched and failed, then analyze why. It surfaces problems early and brings useful uncertainty back into the work.
The Other Ideas is a book for creators. Whether you are an entrepreneur, product manager, designer, marketer, or artist, it is meant to help you find your own path to higher levels of creative thinking. If you have ever felt that uncertainty stands in the way of your best work, this book is for you.
The talk based on this book: Turning Uncertainty Into Creative Power