Creativity in the Digital Era

Some people are more comfortable working with one medium than another. I personally find myself much more creative working with pen and paper than with mouse and keyboard. There is something much more tactile about the feel of the pen sliding across the paper – leaving a shining trail behind it like a snail.

Creativity is a very fickle state of mind – easily blocked by distractions. It makes sense to remove as many distractions as you can when you need to be creative. If, like me, you find that you are much more creative in one medium than another then surely it makes sense to work in that medium as much as possible. Creativity needs the flow.

We live in a digital world, any information that needs to be shared will have to become digitised at some point in its life-cycle. So what do you do if you are like me? If you are more creative when working on paper than when typing on a computer? I find this frustrating on a number of different levels:

• I hate wasting trees every time I need to print a presentation or document so that I can develop it.
• I hate having to carry this paperwork around with me when I travel between offices – extra paper means extra weight.
• I hate how slow the progress can be on a computer screen – only to find it accelerate exponentially the minute the paper lands in my hands.
• I hate the double work I have to do, first on paper and then repeated on the computer.

So I thought that I’d turn this frustration into something useful – a desire to find a solution that worked for me. I did not want to sit still and accept these limitations – I wanted to improve.

I can mark up and correct documents as if I’ve printed them out

A solution that I have found for my computer is a Wacom graphics tablet – the intuos draw. It is a pen and tablet that replaces the mouse. Wacom tablets are used to create drawings, cartoons, graphic designs – that sort of thing. I use it to:

• Hand write directly onto documents
  This allows me to mark up and correct documents as if I’ve printed them out
• Create technical drawings during discussions
  This helps increase understanding and is just like drawing on a whiteboard or paper but with a few distinct advantages:
  • The information is saved on my computer so I can use it again without re-creating it
  • I can do this with people on the other side of the world through screen sharing
• Write quick notes directly onto presentations – for ideas discussion

I have the same problem when it comes to writing my blog posts. If I sit and write at the computer then the results can be a bit hit and miss. But if I write on paper first then I have to spend time later typing my notes up. I know from experience that this can take a long time but is there a solution?

Well I believe that there is – another Wacom product. Wacom has a range of products it calls SmartPads. These are essentially another type of graphics tablet. However, for this one you write with a special pen on normal paper and the SmartPad digitises the results. This can then be transferred to a phone or computer for further work.

It can convert handwriting to digital text. While this is not error proof it does save me plenty of time writing up. The first two paragraphs of this post were written on my Folio.

It has freed me up to create a “writers library” – a collections of paragraphs and ideas. These I can digitise and store to be accessed later. Before, if I wrote something that I didn’t use immediately then I wouldn’t type it up. It would then become lost in an analogue notepad, no key word search capability – gone forever. Digital does have its uses!