Finding the "Zen State of Flow"
Bluescape and Moleskine ignite creative ideas starting with the power of a pen stroke At our recent Future of Work Summit, a discussion ensued around the impact technology has on creative thinking and output. Has the overuse and dependency of digital tools stifled our abilities to work with others and think creatively, or to inspire new ideas and emotions?
Gabriel Walsh, UX Designer at Moleskine, provided an intriguing perspective – a resurgence back to analog, a return to writing, to reach a “state of flow.” It’s about writing or drawing, pen to paper, that taps into a person’s potential to reach heightened states of creativity and analysis. It’s using fine motor control and translating words into characters. It’s thinking not just with words but visualizing concepts. The output becomes the grand idea or the proverbial napkin sketch.
The concept “state of flow” by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes a person who is completely absorbed in an activity involving their creative abilities. His research found that people were most creative, productive and often happiest when they are in a state of flow.
“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . . The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile”
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
If you’re interested in how writing and designing opens up your flow, we have an exciting feature to help stimulate ideas that we’re debuting at Adobe MAX 2019with Moleskine. Creatives, designers and UI/UX professionals get ready for a whole new experience.
Moleskine bridges the analog and digital by offering a notebook and digital pen that captures hand-written words and drawings. A person writes notes or drawings with a digital pen on paper, then using Moleskine mobile app, translates it into digital content that one can be productively edited, organized and shared.
From the mobile app, the content can be shared through text or email, sent to Dropbox or work on in real-time (in sync) with Adobe Illustrator. Bluescape takes it further. The digital content can also be sent to a Bluescape workspacewhere others can share their Moleskine penned content. Now, everyone’s ideas can be visualized, continuous work and discussions happen, presentations and decision making occurs all within Bluescape.
Walsh continues “Bluescape is an amazing platform that allows people to get together and collaborate, meet and share ideas. The question follows, what do we want people to remember from the meeting?” He further adds “People need time to process, write down their ideas and feed it into Bluescape. Great ideas continue to evolve and are even more valuable in a workspace that people can work together and drive creativity.”
The ability to visualize and interact with content, share ideas to inspire and create, is pretty powerful. Let’s talk more about reaching that nirvana flow state.