Creatics - Reclaiming A Word for Barebones.

    

Creatics in Action. Berlin 2008. (c)

Many years ago I invented a new word.

The word was creatics. It was a combination of two other words; the word creativity and the word tactics. If you google creatics, you will find reference to a series of articles, that I wrote in the mid eighties. Unfortunately now, the series was written for a Danish periodical, and thus written in Danish. If you read Danish the series is, in other words, already there for you to read.

You will find that the word later have been taken up by other people. Can’t blame them since it is a good word, but they use it in different contexts. Or in no context.

I will now reclaim the word creatics, and make use of it as a name for a new barebones theme. My intention is to rewrite the articles for barebones, but with the changes and adaption necessary to make a better fit for the barebones communication project. There will be some changes, but not that many. The concept will stay intact.

The main mission with the series of articles was to establish the fact that having an idea, is not something that fall from heaven, but a process that you can learn and learn to deliberately work with in generating new ideas. 

Why is this relevant on a blog on efficient communication? For two reasons:

The first reason is, that in communication creativity plays an important part if you want to stand out from the flow of communication that is all ways surrounding you. Being it voices, noises, images, tactile communication and other forms.

The second reason is, that I find that creatics and phenomenology goes well together. You know, that I have started a barebones theme on phenomenology here on the blog. That theme has, so far, only one post in it, but there will be plenty more. The first post is: phenomenology: what is intentionality?  I can see from the blog statistics, that this post is pretty well read, which is a motivation for speeding that blog theme up a bit.

One of the beauties of creatics is that if you search for something, and you search hard enough, that something will, after a while, come to you in various shapes and/or forms. For many months I had the idea of elaborating on the creatics for this blog. And this is what happened less then two weeks ago: I was ordering a couple of books by advertising wizard David Ogilvy on Amazon. When I order books there, I always have a look around for other complementary titles that could have an interest. And this title popped up: “A Technique for Producing Ideas”. Written by James Webb Young. As the price was fair, I ordered that book too.

And I have read it. That was the specific incident that pushed me to elaborate on creatics on this blog .  James Webb Young phrase two important things about how to get ideas: “First, the formula is so simple to state that few who hear it really believe in it. Second, while simple to state, it actually requires the hardest kind of intellectual work to follow, so that not all who accept it use it”.

If you would like to go ahead on your own, please read this book. The subtitle could as well have been creatics. It is only 48 pages long, so you will read it in no time at all. If you are an advertising woman, or and advertising man, you will appreciate, that the foreword is written by another advertising guru: William Bernbach.

Do I have a photograph for this post? Just to make it a bit livelier? And maybe to make a silent comment to the words? I might have. I’ll insert a photograph later.

Later: I am sure that you have seen the photograph by now? Your task is to figure out why I have chosen this particular photo for this text. And what the photograph does to the text by just being there . 

And by the way; The word creatics is hereby reclaimed. 

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