Creativity is a Broken Thing
Life through a cracked lens.
When street photographer Marius Vieth accidentally dropped his $1,600 lens on the Amsterdam pavement, he thought his day was ruined. Then he had an idea.
Why not shoot with the broken lens, and see what happened?
The result is a moody, dream-like take on the city’s red light district, where unfocus is part of the story.
It reminded me how we often describe creativity with a sense of fracture; it’s ‘ground-breaking’, ‘mould-shattering’. To solve problems creatively, you need to destroy something; a convention, a paradigm, a process. It’s not easy to do.
But we don’t always have a choice. In work and life, things get broken. That’s when you need creativity most of all, to turn flawed raw materials into something brilliant.
It’s no coincidence that the surge in disruptive (another great word for breakage) services and anything-hacking (hack; there you are again) has come at a time of tough odds for many people. The things we take for granted don’t work any more. To get to the good stuff, you need to break, break, break.
So there you are. If you want to be creative, break something.
If something’s broken, be creative.
