Creativity Top Ten

 

  1. Gordon MacKenzie: Orbiting the Giant Hairball. A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace, Viking 1998. This is such an inspiring, funny, astonishing, beautiful book, I love it.
  2. Karl H. Pfenninger and Valerie R. Shubik: The Origins of Creativity, Oxford University Press 2001. Heavy-duty material, top reasearch, astonishing range, no-nonsense stuff to convince the hardest left-hemisphere thinker
  3. Christopher Alexander: The Phenomenon of Life, the Center for Environmental Structure, CA, 2002 plus other volumes of the Nature of Order -series. Alexander is a leading thinker, stunning in insight and in his ablity ot use crystal clear prose, combined with tremendously rich visual material.
  4. R. Keith Sawyer: Explaining Creativity. The Science of Human Innovation, Oxford University Press 2006. The best scholarly work on the various aspects of creativity.
  5. Gehry Talks. Architecture + Process, Mildred Friedman, ed., Rizzoli, New York, 1999. Gehry's figure is so prominent, isnpiring to the inner child in us still capable to enjoy space and constructed reality as an imagination-driven, rather than material-driven dimension of absolute relevance
  6. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, HarperCollins 1996. I think Prof. C's work on flow and related themes is just fundamental to our self-understanding and positive orientation in life.
  7. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, Vintage 1998. Great to read, because one has such a direct and experiental relation to the pieces of creativity beeing discussed - which is some of the best music ever.
  8. Julia Cameron: The Artist's Way (on suom.) Cameron's material is superbly rich. Worth to read on so many levels, the creativity-quotations in her books alone are a treasure chest.
  9. Tom Peters: Re-Imagine! For a more business-oriented mind, a good place to start. Always stunnning to read, the energetic management guru is here at his best.
  10. Anne Bogard: A Director Prepares, Routledge 2001 (on. suom.) Short book, particularly relevant for anybody interested in performative arts and the energy of human connnectivity.

Also Dynamite:

  • Bruce Mau: Life Style, Phaidon
  • Betty Edwards: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, 1979 (new printings, on suom.) A drawing classic that provides inspiring generative metaphors to think about perception, and thinking, at large.