Creative Elegance - the power of incomplete ideas, Matthew E. May
Monday, May 11, 2009 at 09:02PM It is nearly impossible to make it through a typical day without exchanging ideas. Whether deciding on something as simple as a restaurant for a long overdue night out, or as complicated as the design of an entirely new product, we are forever involved in sculpting and selling our creative thought. Conventional wisdom says that to be successful, an idea must be concrete, complete, and certain. But what if that’s wrong? What if the most elegant, most imaginative, most engaging ideas are none of those things? Gaze at the image below for a moment. The three sets of right-angled lines depict something so ubiquitous that you’d be hard-pressed to make it through the day without it. Can you identify it? If you can’t, it’s because a key piece of information is missing. Once that information is shared, however, you will never again be able to see the image in quite the same way again. You are looking at the upper case version of the most widely used letter in the English language. The letter, though, exists in the white space. Do you see it now? It is the letter E. Look again. My guess is that from now on, you’ll have difficulty not seeing it.