After 18 months of testing, learning, tweaking and improving, we launched Nug, our Creativity Bot, last week. You can find Nug here if you’re interested.
Nug is a Chat Bot using Facebook Messenger’s platform for now. Nug was built to help people improve their creativity. Each Tuesday Nug sends out a Creativity Challenge for signed up users to engage with if they choose. They can just as easily ignore Nug. Oh, and Nug is completely free. You click the link, Messenger will fire up, as an app on your phone, or in a browser, and then you can engage with Nug through an easy to use menu response system (if there’s no menu, the type menu or hello. Nug will take it from there).
Nug’s first Creativity Challenge focussed on Restrictions and Limits and how they can play a role in improving your creativity. I didn’t know this (Nug did – clever little bot), but writer/illustrator Theodore Geisel (Dr Seuss to me) was given a challenge (some say it was a bet) by his publisher: Write a book small children will love using no more than 50 words (which could be repeated as often as needed). The result became a classic. The book he wrote was Green Eggs and Ham, the 1960 classic featuring a creature named Sam-I-Am.
Limitations and Constraints aren’t the silver bullet for improving creativity, they’re simply one approach of many that can improve your creativity. Embrace, integrate into your practice, not be afraid of, and use as a tool to push through in order to find an outcome that achieves your goal.
We often think that limitless creative freedom will help us to solve the problem at hand, or give us that eureka moment that allows us to innovate and solve, however, limitless creative freedom isn’t always available to us. It’s possibly more accurate to suggest that for most of us, limitless creative freedom is not the environment in which we are able to operate the majority of the time.
Take a watch of this short well put together video around the Power of Creative Constraints. It’ll be worth your time, and give you an overview of of how limitations and constraints can be the friend of creativity.
