musee.sg: Curating creativity.

Thu, 10 May 2012
2 min read
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I don't know why this is considered creative? But it was the first Google Image search result and it looked eye-catching so I thought I'd use it.

So I’m trying something a little different this year with my students.

In the past, whenever I wanted to show them something creative to students for the purposes of school work (and also just to generally expose them to good aesthetics, intelligent design, etc.), I’d e-mail them to ‘push’ the info to them.

That doesn’t work because students don’t always check their mail (or e-mail from me tends to be ignored… I don’t condone this but I don’t blame them either.)

Also, we have a school-based Content Management System (CMS), but students have to ‘pull’ the info from the site.

And knowing how human beings are like i.e. we follow the path of least resistance, it ain’t gonna happen… (in this case.)

So based on some feedback several of my ex-students gave me last year, I thought I’d set up musee.sg in my own personal capacity to ‘curate creativity’.

I think teaching creative thinking isn’t enough; people also have to be immersed in a creative environment or at least exposed to creative things on a regular basis to become creative too.

So students and anyone who’s interested in this can:

I thought I’d use social media because it just pushes everything to the students who are always on Tumblr/Twitter/Facebook anyway.

BTW I’m developing this organically so everything’s a bit spartan now in terms of design and stuff.

Also, organic means that it might die or it might evolve, but what the hell – let’s see where this goes.

Appreciate any support if you can spare some!

Waterway to travel.

Sat, 28 Jan 2012
1 min read
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Canal between St Andrew's Junior College and St Andrew's School.

This boat faithfully trawls the canal between SAJC and SAS to pick up litter and leaves on a regular basis (every week or so, I estimate).

Based on this, I’ve had some students who’ve suggested using this waterway as a transport route as part of their Project Work [1].

If students can do it, what more adults?

That’s why I think it’s possible for our urban planners to come up with more creative solutions to solve our transport woes instead of just razing buildings and fattening roads [2].

Links

Absent with apologies.

Mon, 24 Oct 2011
3 min read
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Principles of design, the Mr Laremy way.

A long time ago, a friend asked why we write ‘Absent with Apologies’ on minutes.

“If it were me, I’d write it as ‘Absent with Glee’ instead,” she said, “because I’d much rather be absent from a meeting than in it!”

Thenceforth, I decided that if I were to ever run a company or an organisation, my first mandate would be to instruct my minute-taking minions to only ever write ‘Absent with Glee’ instead of ‘Absent with Apologies’.

Otherwise, they’d find themselves the next ones listed under the ‘Absent with Apologies’ column at the next meeting.

*

‘Absent with Apologies’ makes sense, because it’s much more polite than just being plain ‘Absent’.

But I’ve been absent from this space with both apologies and some degree of glee, because I’ve been busy, mainly with work.

On that note, I thought I’d share with everyone something that transpired in the classroom today – this is one of those things that has resulted in my absence.

If I can refer you to the picture above again, you can see I’ve listed out some principles for good idea design, especially ideas involving getting human beings to carry out things you want them to do.

I decided to write this down today because:

  • I found myself repeating stuff I had said before yet again because the kids hadn’t really understood what I was telling them. Or perhaps what I was telling wasn’t making sense.
  • This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I think this is one of the easiest ways to understand what makes ideas work.

For those of you without image suppork, what is written on the board in the pig-ture is as follows:

Mr Laremy’s Principles for GI = EE.

  1. Human beings are animals (piglets) – regulations/processes are needed (DON’T ASSUME THEY WILL DO IT).
  2. Human beings are like currents – they follow the path of least resistance (MAKE IT EASY FOR THEM TO DO IT).

From (1) and (2): [Create] INCENTIVE [for them to do what you want them to do].

If you [yourself] won’t carry out the idea, don’t suggest it!

I hope there’s some kind of ‘meta’ element to this i.e. I hope what I wrote on the board fulfills those two principles.

In any case, the juxtaposition of the student and the ideas on the board is quite unfortunate, but you have it on good authority that this is her default look… LOL.