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Archives of #art

The art is in the engagement! (not the artifact)

‘You’re letting them choose? No no no no. Are you crazy? Seriously Mo – stop making it hard for yourself.’ I was showing some of my creative buddies the individually collaged inside flaps of my Working From Home books, and explaining my grand scheme of laying them all out for the revised revised book release…
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Living Art: how art can help you create a meaningful life.

(Final chapter and excerpt from my new book Working From Home: An artobiography, out January 2022) I remember it was sunny. It was mid-2001, and I was in the office, as usual. Working on a doomed and contentious pitch for IKEA or something equally unfulfilling. (I love IKEA, but this pitch was a politicised non-starter.)…
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The Art of Artistry

The biggest difference between famous artists and “normal” people is artists are driven to do what they do. They have to do it. What they are making is important enough to pursue for it’s own sake, regardless of its financial returns. And surprisingly, it’s often less about innate talent than the compulsion to keep going.…
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Creating Magic: Creative process and wicked problems

The creative process is how we humans make magic. It’s the way we make art, how we innovate, how we breed and how we learn, grow and create our lives. It’s how we become. The secret sauce to our inexorable evolutionary ascent. Every business and every product in our environment is the result of a…
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The ROI of Mess: the secret sauce of innovation

How messy do you like it? Mess is inevitable. It is an essential part of any creative process and an unavoidable by-product of making anything new. You cannot innovate without it, and often it’s a case of the more mess the better. However we appear to have been seduced by the whole concept of production-line…
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Eyes Wide Shut: perception and change

You cannot consciously change what you do not consciously notice. Of course, we unconsciously change things all the time. We fail to notice the bin as we back the car out and change the shape of our bumper bar and the mood of the day. The boss is consistently late or didactic and pretty soon…
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Bite the Plate: accidents breed innovation

I’m a printmaker (among other things) which means I make intaglio etchings – like this one. There are many of ways of doing this, but all basically involve etching a groove in a ‘plate’ of some sort, then smearing it with ink, rubbing that back so that the ink remains in the grooves, and transferring…
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Perception Is The Root Of All Error

ANY CHARACTER HERE Well, maybe not all. But about 90% of all mistakes we make apparently come down to errors in perception (how we map the information we take in) rather than faulty thinking. That’s a phenomenal statistic, because it implies that by just changing how we see things we can have a profound effect…
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