Nowadays I often joke that I’m a “pathological creator”. I feel like if I don’t create something, I’m just wasting my limited time on earth.

But don’t laugh, this is a serious illness, it’s a serious mental illness. When I see something broken, I will obsess over it, to try to find ways to fix it, and if it could be fixed easily but it’s not, I will be highly frustrated, like there’s a bug in the Matrix. All I see is wrong stuff that shouldn’t be this way. And often I have a good idea on how to improve it, sometimes it’s not so clear, but at least I have some clues, but I almost always feel powerless in making it happen. Hence the frustration.

I wish I’d actually be more proactive, act upon it and do something useful like throwing stones at whoever designed things that way.

I don’t know where it comes from, but it seems like this is the constant in the things I do: creating stuff. And by creating stuff I realize how the process of creation is broken which makes me want to create things that improve the process of creating things. (Reading this sentence as a whole gave you the legitimate right of having a coffee break)

Cause I still want to create, but it’s hard to create. And I’m lazy.

So I do want to create, but I do not want to put all those efforts for little results. As much as I like the process of creation, I like the fact something is useful in the end even more.

That’s what we tried to do with Psykopaint, by allowing people to create paintings from photos, we removed some barriers to painting. But it started as a personal issue.

I just wanted to make pretty pictures from photos. I can’t draw and using only code wasn’t expressive and easy enough, so I made some tools to make it easier for me to paint stuff. And I thought for a long time that we made it easy by simply making a software. But what we do is remove barriers using software. This is not just a nuance, it’s a fundamental flaw to think we’re solving software problems.

We’re solving human problems/needs/wants using software.

I wish we become less consumers and more creators. This shift is already happening with the emergence of new interactive medias. And I want to participate into the making of it. People are becoming crea-sumers (I don’t even know if that word make sense. I just made it up.) But even if all you do is share stuff on Facebook, curate things, post your photos, like a profile, You do create. There was nothing, and suddenly there was your little input in the world. You participated in your own way in making it. Even though we don’t think that way at all. All our actions not matter how small participate in the doing of whatever’s next.

Yes even, the process of liking a post is an act of creation. If I ‘like’ your post, it means I validate what you say and this might encourage you to post more stuff in the future. I’m therefore participating in your creative endeavor: Providing feedback which is the fuel of creation.

The 2 big challenges we face is self-bullshiting. It’s mental barriers. Most people don’t think they are creative. And some people think they don’t care either. They are wrong and That’s just false.

Everyone is creative :

You send an email? You create. By picking words and how you mix them.

You talk? You create. By picking words and a tone and how you mix them.

You cook? You create. By choosing ingredients and how you mix them

You read? You create. By creating meaning in your head from the words.

You take a photo? You create. By choosing how, where and when you take it.

You collect? You create. By curating stuff which creates a new meaning as whole.

You dream? You create. By imagining new things that didn’t exists.

You think? You create.

You destroy? You create. By destroying, you allow new things to happen.

You love? You create. By providing emotional support, foundation of creation.

You hate? You kill creativity. And you deserve to die by quartering as illustrated by this image:

But why do I think this matters? Why do helping people create matters? Well in the end if we can all create faster and better, we might fix the world faster and make it a better place. We’re all in this together. I know it sounds like a happy hippy shit. (Well I’m past that point I have to disprove I’m not a hippy.) But it’s something really innate I think in most of us, to want to make the future better than the past and serve something higher than ourselves too. We probably fail a lot of time in making that happen, we often suck at doing what’s good for ourselves and others(we often know what’s good, but doing it is more difficult), but overall I’d say society evolved in a positive way. Although this is an atomic bomb of a subject, utterly subject to personal opinions and debates. You can’t argue that you don’t fear of being burnt alive for expressing personal opinions.

Back to our subject. Where do those mental barriers come from? Endoctrination.

With his famous talk Dr Robinson said it all. Schools kills creativity

Our schools have been designed for the industrial era. Not meant to bring pro-active people in the system. But mass-producing workers. That’s not true anymore and therefore we have to re-educate ourselves. But it’s also the responsibility of tool creators to undo those barriers.

So most of the obstacles we face are a result of this education: mental barriers.

Now that we identified the enemy I guess I’ll leave it for an other post on how to break those ;-)