Hello, all. Apologies for the radio silence in the last couple of weeks; I’ve been moving house.
Written surrounded by towers of cardboard boxes, this week’s article looks at the tantalising question of why creative “scenes” arise. These groups of people, loosely connected inspire a quality and quantity of creative innovation that outstrips in months what others produce in lifetimes, and have given us everything from the industrial revolution to punk. I think there are some key environmental conditions that allow those creative environments to emerge – and some conditions that guarantee that they’ll fail.
This week’s article
Communal creativity
Informal, loosely coupled groups of people often produce a prolific burst of good ideas, changing the worlds of science, art, and music. But why is that? What conditions are necessary for this super-creativity to emerge, and when has it happened in the past?