BESPOKE | 9 DECEMBER 2019
Creativity is the new productivity
Prioritising creativity as the catalyst for innovation, Adobe Creative Cloud for Teams is on a mission to discover and nurture our most imaginative ideas.
Back in the 1960s, professor George Land — the innovative thinker who pioneered the power of play — selected the most talented engineers for NASA. By testing children from an early age until adulthood, Land’s results showed that creativity falls just as dramatically as age increases. If Land is to be believed, innate skills are present initially, yet with a little encouragement we can discover how to master them. Here, Adobe Creative Cloud for Teams clicks into place.
Above the noise
In a culture where people can work anywhere, office abodes are seeing an increasing amount of community seating, hot-desks and open-plan arrangements. Working environments have always been a major area of contention, and issues of noise are a particular concern — and rightfully so. Although, research shows that noise in moderation can aid creativity. A 2012 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research showed that moderate distractions — such as ambient babbles in a coffee shop — aid our thought processing difficulty, which in turn, prompts abstract thinking.
When these creative thoughts come to mind, it’s just as important to have the right tools and software to turn ideas into action. Powered by A.I., Adobe Creative Cloud for Teams lets users get to work across Adobe applications on the move; creativity can be accessible wherever and whenever the user needs: through smartphones, users can share and organise software assets through Creative Cloud Libraries, whether that be in or out of the office.
Undeniably our human minds have a powerful edge; there is room for artificial intelligence to push our creativity to the next level. While Adobe Photoshop users may be familiar with AI when isolating elements of a photograph to the finest detail, Adobe’s accelerating innovation ties together both human and artificial intelligence to magnify this even further.
Adobe Sensei uses AI to create your very own assistant, built to handle enormous amounts of data at high speed, Adobe Sensei eliminates unnecessary time-consuming tasks. Adobe Sensei uses Adobe Stock, an extensive library of images and video, to refine image searches to the finest detail, a truly impressive feature to find images with a similar composition. A task of this calibre would usually take hours yet it’s only a matter of minutes with Adobe Sensei, making it an extremely powerful research assistant that can greatly speed up the search for visual assets, helping users focus on the most creative aspects of their projects.
Time has no rules
Counterintuitively, stubborn work problems that require creative insight are best tackled at times of lethargy. Many feats of mental dexterity require the focus that comes from an alert mind, but when it comes to creative tasks, we work more optimality when fatigued, says Mareike B. Wieth, a professor in cognitive psychology, who studied the effect of time of day on problem solving. It is thought that a cognitive process called inhibition works by freeing the mind of clutter and, often, problem solving needs to involve thinking outside the box.
‘In order to be creative, sometimes you need to consider every possible idea. Having all these different thoughts enter your mind — as you’re not as good at putting them off when you're tired — can actually make you more creative’ says psychologist Ron Friedman, author of The Best Place to Work.
‘In order to be creative, sometime you need to consider every possible idea’ says psychologist Ron Friedman, author of The Best Place to Work.
It’s this wider scope of thought that gives us access to more alternatives and diverse interpretations, many of which can be found on the Adobe Support Community, which has a plethora of solutions from industry experts to everyday troubleshooters alike.
Yet even further inspiration can be found on Adobe Behance, the world’s largest platform to showcase and discover creative work, where like-minded users can be inspired and interact with templates and tutorials. Time is precious, and users can transfer content seamlessly from their Adobe Behance portfolio for greater efficiency.
Association is realisation
Diversity of thought and opinions in the workplace can lead to great innovation and creative ideas. Through free association, notions that are usually seen as distracting are embraced (Considered absurd by many for years, French Surrealist writer André Breton’s unedited stream-of-consciousness writing was later labelled genius). It’s with these new patterns of thoughts that new ideas emerge—especially useful for the creative industry where innovation originality is hard to come by.
Champion collaboration
It is said that a problem shared is a problem halved and collaboration can lift team members to the next level. Asking a colleague for their input on a project is even simpler with access to third party applications such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, making for even more streamlined workflows.
Historically, productivity drove prosperity for individuals, businesses, and economies. Yet today, our technology is solving our productivity demands. But it’s our creativity that has become a scarce resource, shouldered to one side by the measurable output we inherently drive, with more advanced technologies and A.I. at the centre of everything we do.
Going forward, humans stand to make a bigger impact in work and life by being more creative. Ultimately, creative thinking requires our brains to make connections, spark originality with seemingly incongruous ideas and capture spontaneous ideas; make a moment of expressing it with Adobe Creative Cloud for Teams.
