Wreck This Box: Keri Smith’s Activity Books for Grown-Ups

Author, illustrator and guerrilla artist Keri Smith is a master of the interactive journal. Wreck This Box is a recently released box set of her three masterpieces: Wreck This Journal, a lovely illustrated journal inviting you to conjure your best mistake-making skills and indulge your destructivist demons as part of the creative process, This Is Not a Book, which rethinks the purpose and function of a book and invites you along for the journey, and Mess: The Manual of Accidents and Mistakes, a potent antidote for your lifelong conditioning for overthinking and fear of being wrong.

Images by Kimberly Ripley

So vibrant is the cult of Keri Smith’s creations that there’s an entire How to Wreck a Journal Flickr pool, 2121 members strong. The box set, too, comes with instructions for how to wreck it and ample encouragement to “make a mess with the box.”

Wreck This Box is as much a delightful activity for parents to do with their kids as they foster an environment of playful acceptance of imperfection as it is much-needed play therapy for grown-ups as we try to shed our lifelong layers of painful perfectionism and, in the process, unleash our inherent, uninhibited creativity. It’s a quirky, hands-on companion to Brené Brown’s intelligent and research-driven The Gifts of Imperfection.

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James Burke’s Connections: A BBC History of Innovation

What the sociology of the Industrial Revolution has to do with combinatorial creativity.

In 1978, BBC aired a 10-part series entitled Connections, in which science historian James Burke made a compelling case for what’s essentially our founding philosophy: That ideas and innovation don’t occur in isolation, and that creativity is a combinatorial force. (Something more recently echoed by Paula Scher, Nina Paley and Steven Johnson.) True to the program’s subtitle, An Alternative View of Change, Burke debunks the myth of historical progress as a linear force and instead explores the interplay and interconnectedness of events and motives as the origin of modernity’s gestalt.

It’s about the things that surround you in the modern world and, just because they’re there, shape the way you think and behave; and why they exist in the form they do; and who — or what — was responsible for them existing at all.”

The entire Connections series is now available for free online, including the two sequels to the original 1978 program — Connections² (1994) and Connections³ (1997).

For a higher-quality experience, each of the three parts is available as a 5-disc box set, all of which we’ve promptly wishlisted.

The series was also adapted in Burke’s excellent 1995 book Connections, a fascinating 320-page journey into the history of innovation.

via MetaFilter

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Rainn Wilson on Overcoming Creative Blocks

Most of us know actor Rainn Wilson as Dwight from The Office — the egomaniacal yet petty creep who has delivered many a palmface moments for cringing audiences. So it’s interesting — eerie, almost — to see Wilson step far outside his character and reveal what is indeed a rather thoughtful, introspective, profound persona. In this excellent Big Think interview, he talks about creativity, chess, meditation and how to overcome creative blocks — a worthwhile addition to our collection of insights on creativity from thinkers like Stefan Sagmeister, Paula Scher, Sir Ken Robinson, Ji Lee, Paola Antonelli and Steven Johnson.

I think if you’re the driest accountant with the plastic pocket pen protector it’s in how you interact with the world. There is artistry in everything that we do and there is expression in everything that we do.” ~ Rainn Wilson

‘Creative blocks’ come from people’s life journeys. If you don’t know who you are or what you’re about or what you believe in it’s really pretty impossible to be creative. So I think a lot of times when people have “creative blocks” and I know my share of friends do as well if they’re at just some stuck point. They’re not sure what to do with their lives or their writing or their photography or their filmmaking or whatever it is that they’re doing. I think the best advice is you have to change your life up completely; to go on a trip, to go spend a year being of service. Be willing to take some major drastic action to get you out of your comfort zone and go inside, not outside.” ~ Rainn Wilson

UPDATE: Wilson’s SoulPancake: Chew on Life’s Big Questions came out in February and is excellent — a highly visual anthology of musings exploring the human condition from a rich and fascinating array of angles, spanning life and death, art and creativity, sex and relationships, the brain and the soul, science and technology, and just about everything in between.

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