To See or Not to See

look again

13 May 2013

By Maggie Dugan

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The workshops that Knowinnovation runs are often fascinating: we get to collect a diverse group of very intelligent minds in a room for a week, around an important challenge, and walk them through an intense process where they often re-define the problem and generate a number of ideas for potential research projects that will help us better understand the problem, if not help to solve it. In the right environment, people can move extremely fast and far in their thinking, surprising even themselves with their own ideas. It’s something to witness. Keep reading »

Picture This

polypotential

04 Mar 2013

By Maggie Dugan

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As Knowinnovation worked with the core team of NESCent funded project Phenoscape to organize a collaborative meeting last month, we stumbled upon what seems to be a growing challenge with the increase in the amount of data that is available to scientists: how to see and show that data so people can make better make sense of it.

We’d done some thinking in the area of visualization before; a few years ago we facilitated an Ideas Lab about biological imaging. One of the participants at that event was was Karl Gude, a teacher from Michigan State University who in a previous life was director of the infographics for Newsweek Magazine. He’s also a member of the team on one of the projects that was funded from that Ideas Lab, the Open Tree of Life. Keep reading »

Failure Teaching

caution_falling

12 Feb 2012

By Maggie Dugan

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My daughter’s teacher asked me to help out with a school project, one of the objectives of which is to expose the students to the basic elements of deliberate creativity (before they unlearn everything they know naturally). We started with an exercise about failing. The students were given an easy task but with time pressure. Each time someone failed, we applauded wildly. By the end of the activity, everyone had failed and they all thought it was funny. The bad taste of failure was stripped away, so we could look at it in a new way.

We talked about how in school – often for good reason – failure is something to be avoided. We don’t want to fail our tests; we want to do our best. But that in other situations, failure might not be such an awful outcome, it could even be a positive thing. The consequences of failing could be useful, at the very least we can learn from it. Keep reading »

Equating Procrastination

cropped_clock

16 Jan 2011

By Maggie Dugan

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A skilled procrastinator can be highly innovative, inventing all sorts of reasons not to do something, conceiving clever excuses to delay starting or not to have finished. If you have to rely on someone who’s expert at this kind of delaying, it can be maddening. If you’re the procrastinator putting off your own projects, it can be stressful, for you as much for anyone who’s tapping their foot impatiently behind you.

But why do we procrastinate? I’d like to think it’s because we’re not ready. We don’t have enough of something – information, research, ideas, inspiration, stamina – we’re lacking (or so we think) and some part of us feels we cannot start, or continue, until we fill that need. Keep reading »

Do You Feel Lucky?

horseshoes

06 Jun 2010

By Maggie Dugan

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Some people think that creativity is a matter of luck. You’re lucky enough to have good ideas. You were lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time. That guy has all the luck…

Is it luck? Or is luck what happens to you when you do the things that increase your chances of seeing new opportunities? Keep reading »

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