I have long thought that meaningful connections are the fabric of a quality life, whether between people, ideas or things. I found this lovely quote attributed to Steve Jobs regarding connections we make in the ‘creative’ realm.
Creativity is just connecting things.
When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s a rare commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.
The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better the design we will have.
— steve jobs
One Comment
Arlo – I’m slowly catching up on your old posts and I cannot express how spot on Jobs’ words are on creativity. Too true. It’s yet another creative mind who was able to make the verbal connection of what runs our core. So funny how obvious it is when he says it