While looking for interesting material to tweet and Facebook yesterday, I came across this Creativity Post article on stoking the fires of curiosity. One quote stood out.
I thought it echoed an important point heard last year from IdeaFestival presenter Ariel Waldman, whose entire presentation can be watched here.
At the heart of something good there should be a kernel of something undefinable. And if you can define it, or claim to be able to define it, then in a sense you have missed the point. John Peel
It's one of my favorite IdeaFestival 2013 quotes because it goes to the beating heart of discovery: it will always be the work of the curious, individuals for whom the "something good" is never an ending, but a new beginning.
While Ariel Waldman spoke at length of her love of space, the loosely drawn inner connections from her work with Science Hack Day also resonated with me because every discovery springs from an openness to experience, a willingness and capacity to feel things anew. It's what the IdeaFestival is all about. This is what I wrote last year, live-blogging her talk:
Segueing into Science Hack Day, an event for which she is probably more well known, she says that its mission is to regain a bit of the old excitement, of sheer possibility. The people who show up at one of those events are amateurs. They don't HAVE to know where their idea or project is going. She describes several hacks - building a wind tunnel to test a series of letters that will make a new typeface; or a lamp that lights up each time an asteroid passes the Earth; or a mask that would simulate synesthesia, aptly named, given the creepy image she display, 'syneseizure;' or a cocktail made with DNA. On the latter she issues a warning - 'it tastes disgusting.'
What if, she continues, one could listen to mapped sounds of high energy particle collisions? And in fact, she points out, one such instrument has been created, 'particle wind chimes.' There's more: given license to roam freely, to make new and maybe unorthodox connections, the creator of the particle wind chimes may have created something with real diagnostic potential in the hands of physicists. Formerly abstract concepts have been made available to the senses of researchers.
Find some time today to watch the video, which includes a terrific Q&A with MIT Technology Review editor Jason Pontin. You won't be disappointed.
Make plans now to encounter at IdeaFestival 2014. The price for a Festival Pass will increase on Sept. 2, so don't wait! I hope to see you there.
Stay curious.
Wayne