“The more you know, the less you need. The experienced fly fisherman with only one rod, one type of fly, and one type of line will always outfish the duffer with an entire quiver of gear and flies. I never forget Thoreau's advice: 'I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes...'"
—Yvon Chouinard in Let My People Go Surfing.
Chouinard is a mountain climber, environmentalist, and founder of Patagonia. He was writing about product design in the quote above.
I love these two posts by Mark McGuiness on the 99% on why eccentricity and how daily routine helps trigger creativity.
He points out three characteristics of a hypnotic trigger:
I live by daily routines, but I also associate that with my need to feel balanced and in control of my time and the living and working space around me. I also have a tendency to be impulsive or to dive very deeply into activities, so routine acts both as clock and trigger.
There are some excellent anecdotes about the routines of famous creatives. I find myself really intrigued by the more eccentric ones, like those of Victor Hugo and especially that of Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk's act of re-creating his "walk to work" trigger is pretty ingenious. Read more...
http://the99percent.com/tips/7021/Why-Creative-People-Need-to-Be-Eccentric
Sketching interfaces is a path focussed on generating many ideas and finding the right design. Lately I've been thinking about how to adapt the activity of physically sketching on paper to get the same results in Mockups. On the Balsamiq UX blog, I wrote about a technique I've been experimenting with to do sketchboards in Mockups using a Symbols library.
http://blogs.balsamiq.com/ux/2011/04/28/sketching-in-mockups/