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This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.

This article is the last in the Veer series and it's appropriate to wrap up our series of rather wordy articles with a counterpoint. So far the Veer series has engaged the verbal parts of the brain by talking about concepts accompanied by visual images. The neuroanatomy of visual processing, however, is far more complex. Simplifying somewhat, in most people the right hemisphere processes visuals, the left hemisphere uses words and hunts for reason. Even when your visual field feasts on the bounty of changing stimuli the world offers, the left hemisphere constantly tries to rationalize and verbalize what it sees. For creatives, rationalization is the enemy of inspiration, so perhaps some tools can be found in the world of science to aid in the process.

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This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.

We here at Core77 were recently asked by an aspiring designer to explain the two or three biggest time wasters and mistakes a beginner might make. While the old adage "measure twice, cut once" certainly applies to carpentry, the easy space for virtual prototyping provided by the computer allows precise measurement and even visualization without any actual cutting. Precisely because the virtual world is so easy to interact with, computers offer an illusion of finished products convincing enough that it's easy to get stuck in the digital world. The endless refinement of infinite virtual prototypes lends the impression of iterative prototyping without any real-world lessons.

A virtual object can be refined ad nauseam in committee, but the most important avenue for feedback is the real world rather than the nourishing glow of an LCD screen. As we alluded in our discussion of the power of undo on a Wacom Cintiq monitor, it's easy to get preoccupied with perfection in the digital world, but perfect virtual prototypes offer little from which to learn.

A classic business school case on pacemakers contrasted the success of one firm from that of their rival. For the rival, the engineering team constantly developed new and interesting features, many of which could easily be framed as "critical" for inclusion into the next generation of pacemakers. Consequently, their development cycle was constantly dragged out such that releases became sporadic and plagued by delays. The successful firm placed less value in the new, instead implementing a rigid release cycle with inflexible drop dead dates for new feature inclusion. No matter how world-changing a promising feature appeared, it was not allowed to delay the product cycle. Features took a backseat to the release cycle and were simply rolled into the next version when they could be guaranteed completion in a finished state.

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This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.

While in Europe recently, we couldn't help but notice the narrower streets, the increased volume of pedestrian traffic and the incomprehensibly more efficient rail system. So far we have talked principally about sources of inspiration, but we would be remiss to neglect the discussion of historical precedents and structural constraints. As authors like Jared Diamond and Richard Wright have rightly observed, a variety of factors shape both the location and timing of revolutionary insights. European infrastructure, with cities reliant on foot and animal traffic, lent itself to narrow streets and non-orthogonal city plans, while massive public road projects in the (then) less-developed New World paved the way for the multi-lane roadways that spawned drive-in "cuisine." Even the seating arrangements in modern cars weren't structured to be the most effective possible location for a driver, but instead a consequence of the legacy seating arrangements of carriages dating back to the Roman era for the British Empire and carriage wagons in the 18th Century for everyone else.

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This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.

In exploring this series on inspiration, certain recurrent themes come to light. We've repeatedly stressed that inspiration shouldn't be thought of as coming from a sudden divine jolt. Indeed, surrendering inspiration to forces beyond our control would imply a near nihilistic randomness to success. That's good news and bad news, because it implies that we can actually work toward inspiration. But right there is the bad news. Inspiration doesn't come magically; it requires hard work.

Nowhere is the amount of work that's required for progress made clearer than in the natural world. In his book Out of Control, Kevin Kelly quotes David Ackley of Bell Labs as saying "I can't imagine any dumber type of learning than natural selection." So that's the good news. If natural selection can create brains smarter than computers, wings more efficient than planes and tongues as sharp as mass spectrometers, then there's hope for even the densest of us. The trouble is that none of us has 3.5 billion years to experiment.

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This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.

In our first post in the Veer series, we observed that inventions flow as iterative progressions built upon previous work more often than they appear as sudden bolts of insight. Even for those fortunate enough to be roused from a pleasant nap or a frolic through wildflowers with a sudden revelation, that singular moment is built upon days or weeks of tedious research. We spoke a bit about Newton in the context of calculus but didn't leave readers with much insight into what to do when they seek inspiration. Fortunately, Newton knew something about this, observing that if he had "seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." A major backdrop of our articles in the Veer series has been the availability of information in the digital age. When we have the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips and monitors, it seems appropriate for thinkers seeking inspiration to ask, "Well, whose shoulders should we stand upon?"

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This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.

For our last inspiration post, we talked about the power of randomness to shape the creative process, whether supplied by user error or by keeping the additional marks and line used to construct a sketch. As we actually practiced what we preached, sketching in unforgiving ballpoint on bouncy subways, we found ourselves wishing for the Ctrl+Z we'd maligned just a month prior. Still, in our last post, we observed that "loose sketches and unfinished models allow the brain to fill in the blank," and nowhere was that clearer than in the subway, where our rough and light initial sketches almost invariably looked better than the finished product.

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With so much time spent hunched over computer monitors, the Core77 office pondered whether an LCD monitor with a full-spectrum backlight would soften the pain of a sunless day. Sadly, the retinas of our eyes would be worse for the wear. While grueling computer sessions have long been normal for World of Warcraft enthusiasts (well, maybe normal's not the right word), digital tools for art have become so functional that much of the creative process now begins and ends with ones and zeroes.

When we were first introduced to the Wacom Cintiq monitor, the industrial designer demonstrating it quested for the perfect line by scratching his pen across the monitor in arc, pressing undo and repeating the process until he got exactly the curve he was looking for. It was nice to be gazing over his shoulder, but by the end of the demo, there were no crumpled papers, no errors and no record of work. What the designer was trying to achieve was the line quality of a madly sketching artist, coupled with the precision of a draftsman. Before Ctrl+Z, the mashup of those two characteristics was unthinkable, or would have left a trail of abandoned sketches in its wake. Our Wacom pilot, however, had none of the frenzied enthusiasm of an artist discovering the image as it appeared on the page. Instead, he'd become focused on a perfecting a repetitive task, and making his image look exactly the way it did in his mind's eye. Sadly, this approach seems to be rewarded for the individual worker, but thankfully when creatives gather, things look decidedly more old-fashioned.

The hallmark of innovation in most design offices is not a lone designer toiling amid crumpled sheets of paper or in front of a computer screen, but instead a group of people gesturing, shouting and occasionally laughing at a wall of sketches and photographs pinned to corkboard. Although a collage of images that imperfectly represent the product seems an unlikely focal point for innovation, the visual message that they projects can inspire in unexpected ways. While a perfect finished model suppresses insight, loose sketches, unfinished models and unrelated photographs allow the brain to fill in the blank. The humorless intensity with which CAD jockeys focus on their work allows for iterative improvements, but rarely inspiration and certainly not laughter. A team, however, gathered around a collage of visuals, from fast sketches to barely related found photographs, can find a vista open enough to really fuel or divert the creative process, and that that's a value worth preserving, even once the thumbtack is forgotten.

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This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.

Inspiration's a tricky thing; some artists pathologically avoid gazing at the work of others in order to guarantee their work's originality, while others assiduously mine the canons of history to ensure that their art bears the proper influences. In the corporate world, however, the battle between "eureka" moments and synergistic understanding has already been decided. While fine artists, fiction authors and the occasional mad-scientist can work in isolation, those endeavoring to create functional products are rarely afforded that luxury.

Instead, as the history of invention illustrates, the modern creative process relies more on incremental improvements rather than transcendent "aha" moments. Perhaps it's finally time to discard the myth of the lone-inventor. While personal experience may occasionally lead to moments of inspiration, even the story of Archimedes's realization of displacement may be apocryphal. Even paradigm changing ideas like calculus and evolution share multiple authors. Given the number of parallel inventions throughout history, it's reasonable to conclude that such innovation stemmed not from some quasi-mystical firing of neurons in the brain of an anointed inventor, but instead grew as the logical consequence of the progression of other threads of human knowledge, newly applied to a fresh field.

While inspiration may come from the immediate environment or occasionally from within, with billions of people on the planet sharing broadly similar experiences, the likelihood that one misunderstood genius will have a unique and paradigm changing experience independent of shared knowledge decreases with every year and every birth. Instead, most human lives are defined now as much by their interaction with products of human ingenuity as they are by interaction with the natural world. Individually, while being told that one can't be the next Newton or Leibniz might be a touch soul crushing, our modern world (including the screen through which you read this) affords interconnectivity and even interpersonal-connectedness never dreamed of by Newton. He had to perform needle experiments with his own eyes to learn about optics, as he had no peers, but a modern youth can find inspiration in a global community rather than a local one. As observers and participants in the creation of design history, we at Core77 continually find ourselves inspired by the beauty created by strangers and friends alike. Although we can't help but utter a few "why didn't we think of that's," the thrill of seeing innovation by others only spurs us to work harder at our own projects, and smile that we aren't going at it alone.

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