Are Our Machines Stifling Our Creativity?

In the past we often used pen and paper to get our work done.

Nowadays we believe that sitting in front of a computer for long enough will surely enough produce some decent work given enough time.

My own experiments with this show that either 1) I am not using the tool correctly, or 2) it is a fallacy. In fact, sometimes I just feel myself staring at my computer screen whilst time disintegrates.

I have been pondering over this and find that we might be missing some creative catalysts such as twiddling our pens, staring at artifacts in the given room/area that we are seated, scribbling wildly, enjoying the fun of tearing something up, having the ability to change our location easily or even work outside without an electrical outlet. I’m sure there are many others too.

Furthermore, it is quite difficult to concentrate on our thinking at hand without an email or an instant message popping up on our screen to disrupt us.

The questions are: should we go back to pen and paper? Although the computer has increased our productivity, has it increased or decreased our creativeness? The kind of vocations that the ‘creative class’ are engaged in these days are not simply entering pre-defined work orders (ala Taylorism) but require much more thinking, creativity, harmonization of experience and learned knowledge, etc. Are computers/machines perhaps a legacy of Taylorism that do more to prevent unadulterated creativity than to fertilize it?

An interesting point on this comes in the form of Craig Grannell’s five tools to help designers make better websites. Those are: Basecamp, Firefox Web developer toolbar, Subversion, Silverback and most importantly ‘pen and paper‘

It appears to be a very long time before the computer will replace us, or at least, our thinking ability.

Let us go forth, draw, scribble, dream, write and let us see if we can free our minds to produce much better work away from our computer than chained to it.

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