In a reflective monologue recorded at the end of 2009, the speaker laments the vast amount of information on the internet and the fact that much of it remains hidden from them—especially content that could spark creativity. They note that professionals typically stay within their own disciplinary silos (designers reading design blogs, mathematicians following math feeds) and miss valuable ideas emerging in other fields. The speaker poses a central question: how can individuals discover relevant work outside their own domain? They invite the audience to share the unconventional sources they use to gain fresh insights, hoping to build a collective list of “odd places” that can stimulate useful, novel thinking.
Chapters
So here's where I find myself at the end of 2009. There's a lot of stuff that I don't know, that I don't know that I don't know, and that if I knew would be helpful to me. Now, what do I mean? Look, there's billions and billions of pages of information on the internet. There's hundreds of millions of hours of video. Some of which, a very small percentage, would really be helpful to me. It would be important to me, but I don't know about it. Now, one of the things that can help us to find these new insights to spur creativity is to look in unlikely places. You know, we all go to the likely places. If you're a designer, you're likely to read the design literature, blogs, watch design videos. If you're a mathematician, you probably read all the math blogs, you probably follow all the math Twitterers, whoever they are. But we don't find out about the things that are going on in one another's world that are really relevant to what we're thinking about. So that's my question: how do you find out about things outside of your domain? How do you find out about work that's going on elsewhere that's relevant to what you do? I'm trying to figure that out, and I figured the best way to figure it out was to ask you how you figure it out. So where are those places that you go to that have nothing to do with your domain, your job, what you normally care about? Where, where are those places that you go to that you get new insights from? And how about sharing those so that we all can start looking in these odd places to find things that are going to be stimulating, useful, help me figure out some more of what I don't know? That's my question. See ya out there.
