Floored by all the feedback I received after yesterday's talk about Collaborative Creativity! Thank you so much!!!



Quick recap below. The talk was recorded and will be published in a month and here are all the slides: https://www.figma.com/community/file/966721498630334452

The building blocks of Collaborative Creativity start with "Bisociation". It's a concept by Arthur Koestler saying that new ideas essentially are a connection between unrelated frames of thought.

So increasing the diversity of thought, increases the likelihood of novel ideas!

The second describes the core value of creation tools; They allow you to externalize all your knowledge, which allows you to gain *new* knowledge by evaluating your creation.

Based on the "Mind ↔︎ Sketch" dialog described by Bill Buxton in "Sketching User Experiences".

But to best leverage our collective knowledge, we have to enable all our collaborators to *create* in the same space that we create.

This kicks off the (sync and async) loop of Collaborative Creativity and allows us to *better* learn from each other.

But this is not enough! Collaborative iteration and letting others see your earlier work is scary!

So for iterating in the open and, especially, for bold ideas to come up, be nurtured, and evolve over time we need to feel comfortable to fail together.

A huge part of this is played by failing in the open and admitting failure, especially when you're in a position of power.

I've experienced this myself when working with @skuwamoto and it's beautiful how freeing this was (and is!) for me to continue to share bold ideas!

I really hope that all of this shows clearly that working more openly and inclusively is more than just a trend, but that it's an amazing way to find more innovative solutions for our problems at hand.

And I hope these thoughts inspire you to actively work towards this!

So in this spirit of transitioning from a "my ideas" to an "our ideas" mindset, thanks to all of these people (and many more!) for helping me shape this talk over the last weeks and months!

I couldn't have done it without you! This is our talk!

~

We're far from done! I believe there is still a huge potential in leveraging users to help us solve problems better together.

This is nothing new. This quote from Douglas Engelbart (from 1992!) shows that it was clear decades ago!

But I believe that we are just now really transitioning into the "era of collaborative computing".

We're challenging the software paradigms of personal computing and rethink those on top of the infrastructural, and technological progress we have made over the last 3 decades!

I'm super excited to be playing a tiny role in this and can't wait to see where this is going!

If you have any ideas, feedback, or just wanna jam, please ping me, and let's talk!

Fun fact: Multiplayer cursors made their first appearance during the "Mother of all Demos" in 1968!

If you're interested in this 1/2: We're hiring! https://twitter.com/lbudorick/status/1384974101517897733?s=20

If you're interested in this 2/2: @mollyfmielke's thesis "Computers and Creativity" is an amazing deep dive into "how can digital co-creation tools augment human creativity and collaboration"!

Highly recommend checking it out: https://www.mollymielke.com/cc