“Cartographies of Imagination, by me, Sarah B. Nelson, is about navigating the world of collaboration, through methods, tools, techniques and ideas. I’ll share methods, tools, and ideas to inspire you to draw on the collective wisdom around you. I’m an interaction designer and design strategist at Adaptive Path.”

“Whether your chosen medium is pictures or language, food or formulas, everyone has the capacity to be creative in their work. But we can often lose our motivation to create, making it difficult to stay focused and excited on a project. So how does one keep their creative well from drying up?”

“design|snips was born out of my realization that most sites I add to my ‘Design’ folder are bookmarked because of a few elements that are really well designed. Whether it’s the headline style, callout boxes or other modules, I usually am inspired by a few key parts of each site. design|snips will collect and categorize these elements and hopefully help you when it comes time to start on a new interface.”

“Scroll through yards of inspirational images. Share and contribute, see what you can do. Add a personal link to your submission or just engage anonymous. Be part of the longest visual website in the world!” (Note: Could have NSFW images…)

“At a conference recently, I heard Dan Cederholm from SimpleBits talk about inspiration. He showed a bunch of different techniques he uses, including how he uses Photoshop’s mosaic filter on an image to blow up giant pixels representing the basic colors in the picture. He uses those as pallets for the design work he does. Very cool.

Inspiration can come from process, but it can also come from the most unexpected places. For example, when we were designing the data-over-time visualizations for Google Analytics, we were totally stuck with bar graphs. We’d iterated dozens of times, scoured the web for examples to steal, and had tried just about everything. The result felt muddy and chartjunked…”

“Question for everyone: How extensive/thought filled are your critiques that are conducted in class? Two parts to this question: …The reason why i ask this: In my classes, i’ve heard a lot of students unable to speak their mind. I hear a lot of ‘cool’ ‘i like it’ ‘i don’t like it’ all mixed in with the word ‘like’ about 20 times in a sentence. The critiques are often lacking substance, and teh students don’t back up their opinion.”

“‘When a person is in a space with a 10-foot ceiling, they will tend to think more freely, more abstractly,’ said Meyers-Levy. ‘They might process more abstract connections between objects in a room, whereas a person in a room with an 8-foot ceiling will be more likely to focus on specifics.’” (Thanks kottke.org!)

“Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, and SXSW 07. I’m finally back in Austin, for the first time on my own dime, and ready to suck up the excitement without anything getting in the way. I was stunned to find myself facing a sobering reality check. It’s not to say the energy wasn’t there — it was, in spades. I saw all my old chums, and met scads more, many of whom work at companies or publish websites that I admire. The energy was there for the taking. My feeling was that I had nothing to offer in exchange.” Related: The SXSW 2007 Infographic Recap over at Weightshift.

Rodrigo Sanchez on designing Metropoli: “A quick cover will take me two hours, maybe less. The most laborious one can take two weeks. And, as always, everything is relative. It’s not the same to design a cover in which all the elements solely depend on you as opposed to depending on other people: photographers, illustrators, writers, etc.”

“After my last article on experiencing creativity, there was a question in the resulting forum discussion about how to enter this highly creative flow state, the state where you lose all sense of time, your ego vanishes, and you become one with the task in front of you. Is this peak creative state a rare chance event, or can it be achieved consistently?”

“You can’t bottle up inspiration. You can’t put it in a ziplock, toss it in the freezer, and fish it out later. It’s instantly perishable if you don’t eat it while it’s fresh. On Friday I was inspired by a few things. I swore off the weekend and dove into it. And I got about 2 weeks of work done in 24 hours. Inspiration is a time machine.”

“Physical space matters. It’s easier to be productive, creative and happy at work in a colourful, organic, playful environment than in a grey, linear, boring one. And I’m not talking about the outside of the building. Many companies have buildings that are sleek, modern, architectural glass-steel-and-cement sculptures on the outside — and cubicle wastelands on the inside. These companies need to remember that most employees tend to work inside the building. With that in mind, here’s some eye candy from 10 different innovative, well-designed workplaces.”

“I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. ‘A lot of them seem smart,’ he said. ‘What I can’t tell is whether they have any kind of taste.’ Taste. You don’t hear that word much now. And yet we still need the underlying concept, whatever we call it. What my friend meant was that he wanted students who were not just good technicians, but who could use their technical knowledge to design beautiful things.”

“‘If you leave groups to their own devices, they’re going to do a very miserable job,’ says Prof. Paulus. But if people brainstorm alone after the group brainstorming session, it can be productive, he says, adding, ‘It’s ironic: You tap the benefits of groups alone. Everyone still presumes the best brainstorming is group brainstorming.’”

“Coders and designers, we’re from different tribes. Name any issue and we’ll neatly divide into sides: form and function, information and experience, oil and water. Of course, no good website happens without both. So it’s worth noting when we find a piece of common ground on our own.”