JBatistaa

Nike FuelBand.

There’s a deep psychology to the role data plays in motivation.

“When you look at setting a goal, we see a very clear trend that people who set themselves a goal and hit it are so much more likely to stick with any experience than the ones that either don’t set a goal, or set too high of a goal, miss it and get discouraged.” Finding that people don’t need “extreme granularity” and are instead mostly concerned with consistency and simplicity, Olander says what Nike is attempting to do is “make it really easy to level something—give yourself a goal, but then allow yourself to adjust that all the time to what you want to do.” - Nike’s Vice President of Digital Sport Stefan Olander

via CoolHunting

Great piece: Gaming for Behavior Change by @adamdole of @Method. 

find your inspiration.

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday (Taken with instagram)

So you don’t think you’re creative? Think again. 

I’ve never considered myself a creative person. I don’t crank out idea after idea in a brainstorm, theatrically waving my hands in the air and selling in novel concepts with conviction and passion. That’s just not my personality. Apparently it’s not how my brain works either. 

Creative thinking is actually based on our brain’s activity and how we process information, according to Lebanonese psychologist Arne Dietrich (2004). It depends on which part of our brain we’re using and in what context we’re processing information. 

Our brains have developed two different neural systems to extract information: 

Emotional - attaches value and evaluates significance

Cognitive - performs detailed feature analysis and constructs sophisticated foundation for information processing

Couple that with the different environments for which thinking can take place: 

Deliberate - conscious or intentional

Spontaneous - without premeditation or stimulus

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SO that brings us to four different kinds of creativity: 

Deliberate & cognitive - Makes connections between bits of information stored in other parts of our brain. Requires a high degree of knowledge, enough prerequisite information to process, and ample of time to work on a problem. 

Deliberate & emotional - A-ha moments related to our feelings and emotions. Mandates personal, quiet time and stimulus to process and ponder.  

Spontaneous & cognitive - Unconscious mental processing that happens when we’re not thinking about the task at hand. Best when we set up a problem, walk away from it, and then it will come. This does not require any existing body of knowledge related to the problem. 

Spontaneous & emotional - Spontaneous ideas and creations emerge. There is no designing for this and is the tendency of artists, musicians, and the like. 

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This helps me recognize that I’m a deliberate  & cognitive creative thinker, which makes perfect sense considering my knack for making connections, understanding the relationship between ideas, and the need to always ask questions to understand other facets of the problem. So I AM a creative thinker after all. 

Now I can stop trying to be the off-the-wall, ideas-coming-out-of-my-nose and at-the-drop-of-a-hat creative thinker I will never be. 

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Sources: 

Dietrich, A. “The cognitive neuroscience of creativity.” (2004).

Weinschenk, S. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People. (2011). — a must read!

(Source: designcloud)