Dr Chris Stevens is Principal Psychologist with Creative Mastery International (CMI) - a psychological consultancy specialising in maximising individual and organisational innovation and creative performance.

He recently popped in to talk to Knitware about how we could get a little more creative. You can listen to his Knitware interview here … download it or take a dip with individual questions and a brief bio.

Full interview: (approx 20 mins)

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Sir John Hegarty

Sir John Hegarty joins Knitware to talk about the effect of digital technology on brands, craft and design.

Brands in a digital age

I think we live in a very confusing world. Technology is exploding all around us. We don’t need to all go into it, we all understand it. The fact that I’m sitting here blogging is an amazing development in technology and, if you’re a brand, what do you do? How do you navigate through all this stuff? In a way, you can’t. There is no blueprint for saying ‘This is how you do it’ - there isn’t a kind of formula that says, ‘Well you do a TV commercial, from the TV commercial you set up a website, when you’ve set up a website, you start doing that - blogs there, you go into video games…’ It can be a multitude of options.

In the end, when you’re in a world like that all you can really do is simply say, ‘Nobody really knows, so what I’ll do is try and think of better ideas.’ That’s the only guarantee. The guarantee is to say, ‘Actually I might be wrong in choosing that medium, I might be wrong in starting there, I might be wrong in doing that. But what I can do, what I do know, is if I have a great brand idea there’s a greater and better chance that that will communicate and get through,’ - and that’s the only guarantee. read full post »

Cross-posted from DigiCynic

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I re-read the creativity-online article, the next creative revolution from Nick Law, chief RGA’s creative director. And I realised I had got it completely wrong the first time I read it.

Here’s my understanding of what he was trying to communicate to us, in Plain English or Franglish as you may say … read full post »

I was given a Blackberry by my company a couple of months ago. Due to the the obvious ‘always-on’ problem but more due to its addictive quality, I noticed another change in my behaviour. My Blackberry usage was cutting into some very precious ‘thinking time’.

You see, most of my ideas normally come from random moments. In the lift, smoking a cigarette outside, waiting for the tube… Moments when you are not in front of your computer, directly facing your problem and desperately trying to find the next award-winning solution. Well, I wasn’t having these moments anymore, as soon as I was in these situations to let my mind wander, I would automatically reach for my precious Blackberry and start toying with it. Checking and replying to emails, checking the BBC website, even playing the brickbreaker… Everything but letting my thoughts flourish.

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