JasonTheodor.com » Creative Method http://jasontheodor.com Home of The Creative Method and Systems Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:27:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 10 Fake Self-Help Books http://jasontheodor.com/2010/07/10/10-fake-self-help-books/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://jasontheodor.com/2010/07/10/10-fake-self-help-books/#comments Sat, 10 Jul 2010 17:29:52 +0000 jted http://jasontheodor.com/2010/07/10/10-fake-self-help-books/ Continue reading →]]>

I love self help books. They are filled with strange human systems and ideas. I also hate them. There is usually a small seed of an idea that is broken down and then blown out over hundreds of pages. More often than not, the author could have explained everything you needed to know in a small brochure. Here are some of my self-help book ideas. Please send me your fake book cover illustrations if you feel inspired (see below):

Note: This list was created using the patented 10 Ideas In Ten Minutes™ creative method. (You can read about it in my Creative Method and Systems presentation, slide 97)

  1. Don’t Be A Clippy - How to help people without becoming really, really annoying
  2. The Third Place - Working from Starbucks and other stories of caffeinated entrepreneurship
  3. The Holy Bible (Star Wars Edition featuring the NEW! Book of Jedi)
  4. [Update Available] – Living with perpetual iterations of self, society, and socialmedia
  5. The Off Button – When to turn off, tone down, and go out
  6. Living in Your Car for Fun and Profit!
  7. WTF is Wednesday Thursday Friday? – Web acronyms made easy
  8. The Porno Diet – Master weight problems by thinking about sex
  9. It’s All About You – The world’s first personalized print-on-demand non-fiction best-seller (featuring everything we could dig up on you and your friends through social media websites)
  10. 15 Minute Warning – How the desire for instant fame is creating a generation of disillusionment

Email me your fake book covers for these fake books and I will publish my favourites here later.

Posted via email from Jason Theodor’s Creative Method and Systems Channel

]]> http://jasontheodor.com/2010/07/10/10-fake-self-help-books/feed/ 0 The Creative Method and Systems v2 http://jasontheodor.com/2010/06/17/the-creative-method-and-systems-v2/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://jasontheodor.com/2010/06/17/the-creative-method-and-systems-v2/#comments Fri, 18 Jun 2010 04:16:44 +0000 jted http://jasontheodor.com/?p=844 Continue reading →]]> This update to my original Creative Method is more geared toward strengthening your creative weaknesses. I presented this at the inaugural NXNEi conference in Toronto on June 15, 2010.

Download a PDF of the presentation to curl up with later on a laptop or e-reader.
]]> http://jasontheodor.com/2010/06/17/the-creative-method-and-systems-v2/feed/ 0 Frankenstein Monster is a Cut Up, Brundlefly is a Mashup http://jasontheodor.com/2010/01/31/frankenstein-monster-is-a-cut-up-brundlefly-is-a-mashup/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://jasontheodor.com/2010/01/31/frankenstein-monster-is-a-cut-up-brundlefly-is-a-mashup/#comments Sun, 31 Jan 2010 05:25:30 +0000 jted http://jasontheodor.com/2010/01/31/frankenstein-monster-is-a-cut-up-brundlefly-is-a-mashup/ Continue reading →]]>

 

A few nights ago I presented Red Riding Hood Remix: Innovation Through Storytelling wherein I discussed creative methods for looking at things from different perspectives. One of those methods was the Cut Up. The Cut Up is very simple: take a few sheets of paper and “cut it up” in quarters or eighths. Then mix up the pieces and paste them together randomly. Rewrite the randomly placed words, filling in gaps and adjusting for disruptive grammar. Turn it into poetry.

 

This should not be confused with Mashups. A Mashup is very similar to a Cut Up, but it requires a different set of skills. A great Cut Up artist, like William S. Burroughs (author of The Naked Lunch), can turn random words into psychedelic prose through it’s jarring and disharmonious nature. A great Mashup artist, like DJ Earworm, must listen to different material and find synchronous (or similar) elements first and THEN make precision cuts (samples) to re-fit and overlap into one harmonious track. One is a tearing apart and reconstructing, the other is fusing together and blending.

 

It’s kind of like the Frankenstein Monster (cut up) versus Brundlefly (mashup). One is patched together from various body parts dug out of a graveyard by a humpbacked assistant (from Mary Shelly’s book Frankenstein), and the other is genetically spliced together with the DNA of a common housefly during teleportation (from David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly). I realize that neither of these examples make Cut Ups or Mashup very visually appealing. But perhaps this will:

 

 

DJ Earworm mashed together the top songs of 2009. There is something uncanny about mashing 25 songs into a catchy four-and-a-quarter minute song, but he manages to squeeze in the entire Billboard Top 25, and make a decent video at the same time. And it doesn’t sound like a mess, it sounds like a legitimate chart-topper on it’s own (borrowed) merit. At present it has close to ten million views on YouTube. Who says you can’t splice and dice and make something beautiful? (I now have The United State of Pop 2009 mp3 on my iPhone)

 

I am going to add Splice and Dice as another Creative Method to use during ideation: harmoniously fuse elements of similar mediums together, and if they don’t quite fit, use a shoehorn (or pitch-shifter or teleporter).

Posted via email from Jason Theodor’s Creative Method and Systems Channel

 

]]> http://jasontheodor.com/2010/01/31/frankenstein-monster-is-a-cut-up-brundlefly-is-a-mashup/feed/ 0 The Creative Method and Systems Debut http://jasontheodor.com/2009/04/28/the-creative-method-and-systems/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://jasontheodor.com/2009/04/28/the-creative-method-and-systems/#comments Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:42:51 +0000 jted http://jasontheodor.com/?p=305 Continue reading →]]>


Download a PDF of The Creative Method and Systems.

Sign up for the Creative Method and Systems workshop on May 9th in Toronto

After five years of promising myself I would write a book on creativity, I finally got most of my ideas together in one package. I presented this package on April 28th, 2009, at FITC Toronto (an eclectic innovation, design, and technology conference). Cramming half a decade of thinking into a one hour presentation is challenging, but the net result is this distillation of The Creative Method and Systems. It has garnered some attention on SlideShare.net, becoming the Top Presentation of the Day in less than 24 hours after posting. I know this was due, in part, by some wonderful Twitter followers who kept broadcasting and relinking to the slideshow. Thank you very much for the attention. This was also due to a timely interview in BlogTO about creativity at FITC by Corina. Thank you to her as well.

So what’s next? An audio addition to the SlideShare presentation is coming in the next few weeks. I’m also creating a Ning community to challenge, use, and discuss these ideas. If you are interested, you can sign up here. But please note that there is very limited space to start and that you may be placed on a waiting list.

There will be a lot more, as this is just the beginning of The Creative Method and Systems. It will continue to grow and evolve as I work toward improving the sections that need more attention, and reacting to comments and suggestions.

If you are interested in inviting me to speak at your school, institution, or agency, feel free to contact me at Jason.Theodor[at]gmail.com. Please put CREATIVE METHOD in the subject.

Thanks again to everyone who has downloaded, watched, favourited, re-tweeted, and linked to The Creative Method and Systems.

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