We love this extendable VW camper van from Overlander Motorhomes in wonderful Wales. Just don’t drive off before pushing it back together again the next morning.

Philippe Starck is a French product designer who has designed everything from toothbrushes to hotel interiors and is now creative director of interior design company Yoo. His simple, iconic and often startling designs entered the mass market when in 2002 he created a number of beautifully designed, but inexpensive, products for Target stores. Starck writes in a blog post for Wired about what creativity means to him: “Creativity is almost a mortal sickness. It’s not easy to be happy and creative: With creativity comes great anxiety, great effort, great desire for love. To be creative, you have to be curious, generous, to want to try to understand.” For Starck, to be creative, “it helps to live a sort of modern monk’s life. I go early to bed and wake up a little earlier than others because the peak — the hormonal peak of creativity — is around seven o’clock in the morning. To be creative, you can’t be intoxicated by drugs or alcohol. You cannot be intoxicated by poison coming from industrial food. You have to go to the gym and have a lot of sex (although not necessarily in that order!). You also need to live consciously avoid mainstream thinking. If you go out every night for dinner or to a cocktail party, where you speak with everybody, you cannot create because you just end up just repeating what people tell you. You get very comfortable and very unoriginal. The only way to create is to be alone, in front of a white, blank sheet of paper or your computer in the middle of nowhere. It’s the best way to find only your ideas, your intuition.” For most, the idea of living a monk’s life to unleash their creativity isn’t an option, and luckily it isn’t necessary, but it does require some concentrated effort. Creativity is not a a gift that only a select few are given – we all have it, and if we treat it like a muscle that needs to be exercised regularly it will only grow stronger!

Without a culture of creativity in a business and without resorting to just copying other people’s ideas (hello China), innovation becomes impossible. And innovation is what drives growth in the good times, and survival in challenging ones.  The President of Ohio-based bathroom fixtures company Moen, David Lingafelter, is convinced that innovation driven by creativity is what has helped his company survive the recession. Interviewed earlier this year he said they don’t just follow trends, they also try to create them. Once a year Moen designers get together to sketch out products that don’t yet exist.  “They’ll sketch for an afternoon, and they’ll bring ideas to each other,” he says. “They’ll work off of the energy of one another. You’d be surprised at what comes out of that. If you’re working around a bunch of people who love to do it, energy gets created. It feeds on itself. If you say we’re going to make the same chrome faucet, turn the lights out and run the machines, no one wants that. Whether it’s our product development process, whether it’s functionality innovation, whether it’s style uniqueness, all of that stuff excites people.” Escaping from the everyday reality to envision future possibilities are clearly a key part of innovation for Moen and should be for all businesses.

This is a nice piece on seeing different perspectives that appeared in the Atlantic and was written by Laura Seargeant Richardson, a principal designer at frog design, a global innovation firm.

Javier Hans is on a mission to change how the world’s youth think about creativity and innovation. At nine, he founded Inventors Without Borders. At 15, he was the winner and youngest entrant of the Invent Your World Challenge sponsored by Ashoka. Most recently, Javier spoke at TEDx Taipei, where he unveiled his immersive role-playing game, Inventors Village.

Impressive as his young resume is, he isn’t the only one in his family with a creative mindset. Javier’s brother Fabian, and his mother and father, Ester and Peter, recently launched a program called “Invent and Innovate” that helps youth use their imagination productively. They’re also producing a TEDx event this fall in Woodlands, Texas, which they are calling “Kaleidoscope Mind.”

My parenting approach for my daughter is to help her see possibilities, to tune her to new frequencies.

The term kaleidoscope is Greek and is loosely interpreted as “an observer of beautiful forms.” So what, then, is a kaleidoscope mind? The Hans family would say it’s “a type of mind that is agile, flexible, self-aware, and informed by a diversity of experiences.” It’s a mind that is “able to perceive any given situation from a multitude of perspectives at will — selecting from a rich repertoire of lenses or frameworks.” They would say that a kaleidoscope mind is playful, and it must be able to “see patterns, connections, and relationships that more rigid minds miss.” And they would say that a kaleidoscope mind can be taught. I would agree.

Like a radio frequency, people can be tuned to see differently. Once you learn a new skill, such as how to ride a motorcycle, you become sensitized in a way you weren’t before. You start to see more motorcycles, you become aware and give them more space on the road, you acknowledge them, and you remember what it feels like when the wind hits your face at high speed. Seeing creatively is a bit like that.

For example, I recently gave a presentation at a conference on the youth advertising industry, after which one attendee asked me, “What do you teach your daughter?” I gave him the example of a homework assignment where my daughter’s school asked that each first grader write 20 book reports. The teachers sent home a template of what was expected. She did the first ten based on the template. Then, we identified all the elements of a book report, brainstormed other ways that information could be presented (such as writing a letter to the main character, writing the book as a newspaper, writing a play, acting it out, etc.), and each report thereafter was done in a way other than the one prescribed in the template. My parenting approach for my daughter is to help her see possibilities, to tune her to new frequencies. This creative perspective is not a gift. Rather, it is a skill that she can master.

But what about adults who have already-developed minds that they consider to be something other than creative? I think the answer is to learn creativity in structured ways that I call “sight frameworks.” Like Edison, it’s how I have purposely trained my brain to become aware of patterns that lead to innovative thinking. I’ve introduced these ways of seeing creatively through presentations and workshops at conferences like CPSI (the Creative Problem Solving Institute), and will again this coming January at IIR USA’s Creative Leadership Academy in Sundance, Utah. One of the easiest frameworks to demonstrate is “contextual sight.” Just by changing the context (forcing a sight change), new ideas and insights emerge. Take the topic of temporary tattoos. We think of them mostly for children’s birthday parties or Halloween. But what if we changed the context and thought of temporary tattoos as they apply to the military? Indeed, in the last two years temporary camouflage tattoos were created to replace face paint in military applications. Now shift the context to the medical industry. Temporary tattoos are now used instead of medical ID bracelets to identify someone with a medical condition. I could introduce many more contexts such as zoo, fresh produce, and even diapers, and without much difficulty you would have many more ideas about how temporary tattoos could be used.

As biochemist Szent Gyorgyi once said, “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” You’ll find that as you start to see differently, creativity comes easier. And just like a kaleidoscope, any way you turn will produce creative thinking.

Sometimes taking down walls and cubicles to improve interaction, collaboration and creativity can have unintended negative consequences.

“The intent of taking away dividing walls and doors is usually to improve creativity and performance by fostering spontaneous fun, interaction and sharing,” says Professor Cummings of Victoria University in New Zealand.

“However, we found evidence that it can lead to attempts by employees to re-create spatial and social structures and boundaries, actually undermining the behaviours an organisation is trying to encourage.”

Closed stores look ugly for passerby and detract from the streets they are, making them look less attractive and vibrant. That’s why the idea of dressing them up with attractive fake shop fronts, with colorful window displays is such a good one. Fake shop fronts are starting to appear in the South East of England, where the recession has taken its toll and many shops have closed, and are now making their way over to the US. As well as improving the appearance of the shopping street, they would also seem to have the benefit of inspiring would-be tenants what the store could look like when occupied. One company that is creating these fake fronts is Shopjacket and prices start from just a few thousand dollars.

It’s a great demo of ad agency Dentsu London’s mission: “Making Future Magic.” More details on the project and some other inspiring ideas here.

I like how she says on her website, bolded and highlighted:

CONTRARY TO WHAT YOU MAY HAVE READ ON THE INTERNET, THESE ARE NOT FOR SALE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.  IT IS A PRIVATE PROJECT.