The gradual production of thoughts when speaking

Happy Epiphany 2022

Like every year, the sixth of January is the moment to wish you all the best for the new year. The sixth of January is Epiphany day – the 12th and last day of Christmas. The holiday season is over, and we can focus on the coming year.

Because epiphany is also an experience of sudden and striking realization.  I have written a little story involving a creative technique that Heinrich von Kleist used two centuries ago. Please find it on the music thinking website, via this link:  “The gradual production of thoughts when speaking“. 

And it is also an announcement about my book coming out in April 🙂

I wish you good luck,
excellent health and
many break-through
epiphanies in 2022

Lockdown Economy Talk with Christof Zürn

In this interview, we meet Christof Zürn, the founder of Creative Companion, a business that helps organizations use creative thinking to create sustainable business innovation. The COVID-19 pandemic has made flexibility one of the most important resources in any business, as companies have been forced to alter their strategy and switch-up their goals. Christof spoke about the importance of creative thinking in ensuring that businesses can stay on top of developments in their sector and described how his methodology, ‘Music Thinking’, can help companies connect their different priorities and develop better, more sustainable business designs.

Christof was forced to utilise flexibility himself by moving his consultancies online and experimenting with new platforms. When business began to slow down for Creative Companion due to the pandemic Christof used this quiet period to develop and strengthen his ‘Music Thinking’ methodology and to network with other members of his sector to develop new concepts aimed to help boost business creativity and connectedness. Christof’s key message was one of progression. He emphasised that although the pandemic has encouraged everyone to wish for things to return to how they were before, Christof believes businesses will gain more value from building on this experience and progressing with it. To do this, creative thinking is fundamental.

What 3 things does the guest need help with? Christof would like help in finding companies who are open to making a fundamental change in their business thinking. He is also looking for a publisher for his book regarding ‘Music Thinking’. Please support the Lockdown Economy with your donation on our GoFundMe page https://www.gofundme.com/f/lets-help-…​ In the Lockdown Economy interviews, small business owners and self-employed professionals share their insights, challenges and successes during the COVID-19 global pandemic to inspire, motivate and encourage other entrepreneurs around the world.

About the Guest As ‘Creative Companion’ Christof is accompanying individuals, teams and organisations to make the step from iteration to innovation to transformation. He does this with decades of experience in branding, digitalisation, service design, design thinking and developed a fresh methodology he calls ‘Music Thinking’. “Website: https://creative-companion.com/​

Send Christof a message with why you want to connect on LinkedIn: https://nl.linkedin.com/in/creativeco…​

About the Host Rosie Allison is a master student of Media and the Creative Industries at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She aspires to work in the creative industries in the sphere of communications, using her interpersonal abilities to help drive innovation in the workplace. #lockdowneconomy_local​ #SDGAction36773​ #entrepreneurship​ #restart​ #SDGs​ #lockdowneconomy​ #creativity​ #creativethinking​ #designthinking​ #musicthinking

#GenerationCo#brandswithaconscience#lockdowneconomy​ #creativity​ #creativethinking​ #designthinking​ #musicthinking

A tactile approach to Service Design Thinking – Design Thinking & Lego Serious Play

Service Design Thinking is an approach to problem-solving that allows individuals to rapidly identify challenges and then go big on ideas before picking one or two to ideate, test and evaluate. 

Principles are:

• Holistic – seeing the big picture in relation to details
• Empathy – human-centered focus on real needs
• Co-creation- iterative approach with stakeholders involved

At the intersection are ideas that last, ideas that are surprising, ideas that work. Before moving into the solution space of the Design Thinking process we heavily rely on words: spoken or written.  But words have two inherent limitations.

1. Firstly most of us filter what we say, only articulating things that will make us sound smart, intelligent and well educated.
2. Secondly, the part of most necessary for Design Thinking to work, the Limbic System where passion, music, creativity, and love sit – does not have any language capabilities. In other words, it’s almost impossible to articulate love, music, feelings and conceptual ideas.

One of the challenges in Design Thinking is to visualize all the words people use and make them meaningful for everyone involved. We use a set of tools, canvases, visual techniques and a lot of different materials to play with possible solutions and tinker with a prototype. One of the materials we use in prototyping is Lego.

Service Design Thinking and Lego Serious Play

But there is more to Lego than just playing. Lego Serious Play, the methodology created by LEGO over ten years ago, is an approach that allows teams to find creative solutions to open-ended challenges. The real strength of Lego Serious Play is that we don’t use words, we use ‘art’ and creativity to express something – in this case Lego. It allows for more complex and creative concepts and ideas to be modeled.

Building models with Lego Serious Play

Together with Ben Wickham we thought about how we could combine the strength of Design Thinking and Lego (Serious) Play to design ‘a tactile and playful approach to Service Design Thinking’.

We are going to crash these two concepts together: taking Design Thinking as the roadmap and Lego (Serious) Play as the way we execute. The result is a tactile approach to Design Thinking, for those groups and challenges that require a more intensive and deeper approach.

On the 28th & 29th March, at the Design Thinking Centre in Amsterdam, Ben Wickham & myself will lead a two-day workshop to help you get to grips with the basics of both approaches and their collaborative power. To help us, we have identified a global challenge to address: that of urbanization. If we can fix that – we can fix anything…

We would love to see you.

Click here to book, or if you have any questions, drop Ben or me a line.

See you end of March.

Augmented Reality Magazine

Nice to play with the cover of the Wire Magazine January 2018 edition. If you can’t find the magazine and want to experience the augmented reality feature, you can download the app and a PDF. Have fun.

 

 

 

 

There are many shades of white | Epiphany 2016

As my friends know, I like January 6th! Every year they receive a mail with good wishes on this day.

It’s Epiphany day – the 12th and last day of Christmas. For me it is also the day of changing perspective – a magic pivot. The holiday season is over and we can focus on the coming year.

 

A great moment to wish you all the best and:

I wish you many Epiphanies in 2016!

Epiphany also stands for an experience of sudden and striking realization. The word epiphany originally referred to insight through the divine (see the link with the three magi). Today, this concept is used much more often also without such connotations, but a popular implication remains that the epiphany is supernatural, as the discovery seems to come suddenly from the outside. More on this see below.

There are many shades of white

When we were visiting the biennale in Venice last year we also went to the pavilion of Uruguay. When we entered the room, our first thought was that Uruguay did not manage to reach the deadline, because we could – at first sight – not see anything. Only white walls. Nothing there. We just wanted to turn around and stroll further.
But, wait a minute, there are some people close to the walls looking into the deep white space. We went closer and then our eyes adjusted to the bright light and we started to see shapes, forms, shadows of tiny paper objects. The rich world of cut-out white paper on white surface. There were literally Many Shades of White. The artist is Marco Maggi.

It also reminded me of the work of John Cage and his conceptual 4’33” piece about silence. Or better, the ability to focus, listen and look very carefully. A good exercise I want to keep in mind for the coming year. In the hope to get many epiphanies.

 

What exactly is epiphany, here is a collection (repost from 2012):

EPIPHANY is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something.

PHILOSOPHICAL meaning: having found the last piece of the puzzle and suddenly seeing the whole picture.

ARCHIMEDES Eureka! I found it!

EINSTEIN was struck as a young child by being given a compass, and realizing that some unseen force in space was making it move.

DARWIN An example of a flash of holistic understanding in a prepared mind was Charles Darwin’s “hunch” (about natural selection) during The Voyage of the Beagle.

JAMES JOYCE Referring to those times in his life when something became manifest, a deep realization, he would then attempt to write this epiphanic realization in a fragment. Joyce also used epiphany as a literary device within each short story of his collection Dubliners (1914) as his protagonists came to sudden recognitions that changed their view of themselves or their social condition and often sparking a reversal or change of heart.

In RELIGION it is used when a person realizes their faith or when they are convinced that an event or happening was really caused by a deity or being of their faith.

WESTERN CHRISTIAN Religion: The adoration of the magi, represented as kings, having found Jesus by following a star 12 days after christmas.

HINDUISM epiphany might refer to the realization of Arjuna that Krishna (a God serving as his charioteer in the “Bhagavad Gita”) is indeed representing the universe.

In ZEN kensho describes the moment, referring to the feeling attendant on realizing the answer to a koan.

BUDDHISM Buddha finally realizing the nature of the universe, and thus attaining nirvana.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS is talking about a drug-influenced state, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of the fork (naked lunch).

EPIPHANIES is the thirteenth episode of the second season of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica television series.

EPIPHANY is a web browser for the GNOME graphical computing desktop.

HIERONYMUS BOSCH painted the adoration of the magi around 1495.

HOMER SIMPSON has an epiphany, after visiting a strange Inuit shaman, and realizes he has to save the town from Russ Cargill’s plans to destroy Springfield.

The last page of THE WIRE magazine with surprising sonic stories about music is called EPIPHANIES.

Interesting: if you search for Epiphanies or Epiphany on TWITTER many people talk about that they (just) had an epiphany, but don’t exactly say what it was.

Christof Zürn,
Nijmegen, 6th of January 2016

 

Need more inspiration?

Please consider to visit my other websites:
www.creative-companion.com for Design Thinking, Service Design, User Experience Design and Online Strategy.
www.MusicThinking.com for inspiration, tools and discussions about how music can help us to be more creative.

Google is using music thinking to promote YouTube with insights and infographics | #EDM #MusicThinking

EDM electronic dance music

Think with Google the research and insights portal of Google posted a new article using music (in this case EDM electronic dans music) to show their compelling data and drive brands to YouTube to connect with their audience. They do this with a very nice infographic in the form of a decision tree.

The Biggest Music Genre You’ve Never Heard Of

How much do you know about EDM, or electronic dance music? Whether it’s a lot, a little or none at all, you’ll want to tune in to this profile of EDM fans. What you see might just surprise you: For example, while millennials under 25 view the most EDM content on YouTube, older audiences are becoming increasingly interested as well. And it turns out that EDM fans are more likely than their peers to be online, engaging in tech-savvy behaviors such as buying music online or following a brand on a social network. See how fans are increasingly turning to YouTube to learn more about music genres such as EDM and the opportunities this creates for brands.

Download PDF: EDM electronic dance music

This is a nice example of Music Thinking

What you see is what will be – Epiphany 2015

January 6, is a special day! Epiphany day – the 12th and last day of Christmas. For me it is also the day of changing perspective. The holiday season is over and we can focus on the coming year. A good moment to wish you all the best for 2015!

But epiphany is also an experience of sudden and striking realization. The word epiphany originally referred to insight through the divine (see the link with the three magi). Today, this concept is used much more often also without such connotations, but a popular implication remains that the epiphany is supernatural, as the discovery seems to come suddenly from the outside.
More on epiphany in an older post.

My epiphany exercise
Over the last year I made more than 3.000 pictures with my iPhone camera. Snapshots, selfies, screenshots or pictures to just remember something; people, things, situations.

81 pictures (of more than 3000) on my iPhone in 2014. Click to enlarge.
(c) CREATIVE COMPANION 2015

Above you see 81 pictures from my iPhone collection ‘more or less’ selected randomly and ‘more or less’ grouped unintentionally: pictures from workshops, encounters, visits to museums or cities, personal pictures with family and friends; pictures while traveling, being on vacation or sessions, while working, lecturing, pictures of things that somehow reached my iPhone. If we have met the last year you may recognize some of the pictures.  I love the pattern, the red line, something that connects all or at least some of the pictures.

But it is not just about what I have nearly literally seen, but what do you see? You can click on the picture to get a higher resolution.
Is it funny, innovative, useless, disgusting or – wait a minute – something (maybe familiar), something you have not seen this way? Something that suddenly triggers your mind, get you an idea or an epiphany? Be my guest. Have many of them. Share them if you like.

Use your own pictures
Why not do this with your own pictures? Take 81 pictures (less or more) from your camera, smartphone (think Pinterest, iPhoto, Instagram, …) and make a new pattern of pictures. Maybe you see new things or old things in a new way – isn’t innovation for 99% the connection of already existing things?
Try to find the word, phrase, motto that connects all the pictures, make groups or just have fun with all the colors. What you see is what will be.

I wish you many epiphanies in the coming year!

 

10 Quotes from the big world of music – Music Thinking Quotes Vol. 1

For quite some time I am collecting quotes that have a connection with what I call Music Thinking (more about Music Thinking click here). At the same time I am working on a more systematic way to collect and combine music thinking principles. I am working now with 6 principles of music thinking: agility, empathy, personality, jammin’, score and remix. More about that in a later post.

Here are 10 quotes of more or less famous people with a music thinking connection. Hope you like it.

 

 

You can also find the presentation on SlideShare (download enabled).