“The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.”
Johan Lehrer
In reading Johan Lehrer on creative interactions in The New Yorker I couldn’t keep from relating it to my Google+ experience. The energy, the excitement, the inspiring discussions I have on Google+ are a result of the architecture of this virtual space. The unplanned, sometimes irrelevant-seeming content I see, creates the same kind of “knowledge spillover” described by urban theorist Jane Jacobs.
My own university tried to create a similar environment with its Interdisciplinary Studies programs. I have always been the bridge between disparate groups — realizing that a person in one group had a solution for the problems of another group and bringing them together.
Perhaps we should resist our impulse to curate our social circles too much…to circle and categorize and create channels and install noise controls. Apparently what stimulates creativity is a certain kind of chaos. According to Lehrer, “Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential.”