Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses

a project will usually appear to you at the outset in some kind of idealized form. Then you start to make the work, and when you get halfway through you realize it does not look like what you imagined at all. The important part is everything that happens after that point.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficientl

By this definition, art is less an object and more a process of exploration.

In corporate circumstances the same kind of cooperative success happens when a group of manufacturers or growers get together to collaboratively build a market. The Milk Board creates national campaigns encouraging people to drink milk, which people buy generally through local or regional dairies. The group increases the total potential for success

Aesthetic creativity includes designing for joy, as in the case of the bandages, or for simplicity, as in the case of train timetables and elegant clocks.

one of the kindest compliments you can pay to someone who is engaged in the deep middle of a creative project is, “You’re not crazy. Carry on.” And then you can try assigning roles and process goals and building an architecture to help them.

The basis of our humanness is in our ability to create things. Our art—in the broadest sense—is whatever we make visible in the world. Each of us has to choose the scale at which we want to be artists of our own lives. It may be your family or your job or your neighborhood.

the Bauhaus, the German school and social experiment started in 1919 and disbanded in 1933. The Bauhaus took as its founding mission the connection of the creative and commercial arts.

Change and reinvention are essential to longer-term success.