[thelist] "A Brief Rhapsody on Art and Engineering"

[George Dillon]

Thanks, Steve, for sharing that nugget with us.  I'm glad I'm not the
only one to occasionally drift off into the philosophy of creativity
;)

However, with your "one of the best descriptions of the start of the
creative process" you really clicked my button.  Some evistas will be
aware of my theatrical past which accounts for my instinctive reaction
to DISAGREE with the thrust of your Rhapsody.  Indeed I have spent 15
years developing an approach to creativity (and much else in life)
which is founded precisely upon the AVOIDANCE of fore-thought.

So I was particularly surprised to see 'Zen' cited in support of a
pre-conceptualising approach.  As I recall  (and it's >20 years since
I read it) Pirsig's point was that Aristotle had led Western
philosophy up the garden path of reason and, in the antithesis of Zen,
the result is that 'we' tend to put thought before action (or the
destination before the journey) and have great difficulty doing/being
otherwise.

OTOH it was a very neat quote, with such obvious relevance to web dev
that I'll be spending the rest of the weekend meditating on these 3
questions:

1.  What similarity is there between artistic creativity and
technological development, if any?

2.  Can creative methods developed by and for individuals be applied
to team-working?

3.  Even freelance/one-stop web designers need to marshal such a
variety of skills, might a team-working paradigm be the only one
appropriate to web dev?

Or maybe I'll just scan the cat again.

George Dillon

http://www.georgedillon.com