During last week’s lecture,  Jason from instil referenced the TED Talk, ‘Embrace the Remix’ by Kirby Ferguson. He said that we should watch it as it helped him understand what creativity really is.

This sounded like it would be very beneficial to me and my work so I decided to watch it and take some notes.

Embrace the remix

Ferguson begins his presentation by setting the scene ” We’re gonna begin in 1964″ This gets my attention as he elaborates, “Bob Dylan is 23 years old and his career is just reaching its pinnacle” This lets me know that he is about to start talking about how remixing has affected the music industry.

Ferguson goes on to explain that in Bob Dylan’s earlier songs a lot of his melodies and sometimes lyrics were taken from even older folk songs. He used the examples of ‘Nottamun town’ and Bob Dylan’s song  ‘Masters of War’ to show this. This is a trend in folk music as most melodies stay relatively the same and the artists voices and lyrics differentiate them from other songs.

Ferguson explains that remixing is a popular thing done in the music industry and not only that but he believes everything is a remix of something.  Every new product is comprised of older products combines, Ferguson explains that thinking like this is better for creativity as it makes you think ‘without not within’.

I really enjoyed this quote as I had never put it into those words before. When I come up with ideas at the moment they are rarely just ideas that come straight from my head, imagined completely originally. They are, mostly, amalgamations of drawings and designs I’ve seen in the digital or real world. Ferguson saying that this is how creativity actually works instead made me feel more confident in what I do as I have previously felt bad for not having unique, wonderful ideas straight from my brain and nothing else.

Kirby Ferguson went on to explain the phrase ‘loss aversion bias’ which describes how we have a strong deposition to protecting what we feel as ours. We have less of an aversion to copying what others have’. The example he gives for this concept is comparing Steve Jobs in 1996 saying “We have been shameless about stealing great ideas.” to Steve Jobs in 2010 feeling betrayed by android and calling it a “stolen product” and a “rip-off” Jobs was so adamant of this that he wouldn’t settle any lawsuits between him and Google.

Ferguson ends his presentation by urging us to be less depreciative of ourselves and our creativity because we cannot come up with completely unique ideas. He describes how we are all dependant on each other for our ideas and that this does not mean we are mediocre but that ‘Everything is a remix’.

My thoughts

My overall thoughts on this presentation is that it was very impactful for a video that is just short of 10 minutes long. I was entertained throughout and in the end I’ve gained a bit more confidence in my design process. It’s always beneficial to hear that creating things comes from external references and inspirations because it’s true, we wouldn’t have the technology or science we have today if scientists weren’t basing their work off of previous science and information.