Creativity Catalysts

Scott McCloud's talk ranks as one of my favourites on TED...

I was never really into comics. I don't know why.

But I do get Garr Reynolds point about looking more widely in order to improve whatever you are doing.

In South Africa, our studies are pretty vocational. If you want to be a doctor, you study medicine. If you want to be an engineer, engineering; an account, accounting, an actuary, actuarial science and so on and so forth.

In England they seem to get it more right. You start of by studying anything. Absolutely anything, from the mating habits of the north sea clam to genetics, and then you do whatever you want. You go join a hedge fund, or an architectural firm or you go to medical school.

We need to be taking it a step further. This rubbish of specified professions is part of the problem. You have medical, biological, philosophical etc. conventions every year where everyone learns more and more about their own professions. What would happen if each year you went to a different professions conference?

Obviously the presenters would have to get better at speaking with less jargon. But lets be honest, even within your own profession, unless you are intimately involved with the very specific area that a paper is being presented on... very few people are really able to participate.

Sure, there is still space for the very academic, very specific papers... but wouldn't conventions be far more interesting if the first talk was on design, the second on the human genome project, the third on behavioural finance,the fourth on the history of China, all round up with a stand-up comic.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if there were more professionals, academics, artists and thinkers from different fields working together like in TED, and less narrowly defined professional bodies.

Then again, wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to be defined by where we were born, who our parents are, and what language we speak...

YES WE CAN!