There is an absolutely dull and pointless story in today’s NYTimes on creativity. Though it is titled Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work, this story clearly did not take much time to write. I agree not all articles in the Times are (or need to be) hard news… but even opinion pieces should have something new to contribute. This is old wine in an old bottle. There are the standard quotable people diligently quoted (Csikszentmihalyi and Drucker and of course Pasteur muttering “Chance favors the prepared mind” from his grave), the myth, which is not really a myth, duly repudiated. If anything the article seemed to be a thinly veiled plug for Jim Marggraff, (inventor of an interactive world globe called the Odyssey Atlasphere, the LeapPad and LeapFrog’s Fly talking pen).

In contrast to this pablum check out some real creativity:

First. The Origami of Robert J. Lang. Check out this Tree Frog, created from just one uncut square of paper.

As he says: The cool thing about origami is that it is a very mathematical art. In many arts, there’s pure artistic skill. In origami, it’s almost half and half. You can do things with pure art, you can do things with pure math, but if you put them together, you get far more satisfying results than either one alone.”

Second, is the Kinetic Sculptures of Theo Jansen.