Surprised by Flow from an unexpected quarter
The result of two hours exploring: look at it! A ghastly sea creature.
Coming across the eGame "flOw" (go to http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/ ) I was surprised to see Csikszentmihalyi mentioned. His typical challenge-ability axes were shown, with anxiety above the challenge-ability match (challenge too difficult) and boredom below the challenge-ability match (challenge too easy).
I dabbled at the game and, after an immersive two hours. I created a creature from a basic amoeba. By working out how to get my amoeba to eat plankton it grew healthily, with many segments to its body. The creature is shown above.
The wonderful realisation is: I was choosing to organise myself, to deal with the amiguity of no rules in a game with no objective (other than my need to construct my own meaning), and slipping into a state of flow.
In an inchoate way I was pathfinding and generating heuristics to make sense of my explorations.
This is something the student Cara found with her project work. She chased up a comment I made a year ago, for she recognised the state she was in (i.e. flow) from what I said. Not playing a game - rather, working on a project, Cara still entered a state of flow. She was alive to what she was doing and was insensitive to time. She had become absorbed in her work. As I had become in feeding my amoeba to become the monster shown in the diagram above.
This idea of flow has implications for creative work and how it is managed. Creativity needs long stretches of time. It cannot be turned on and off like a tap. Current timetabling systems follow the "tap model". What did Amabile say in her HBR paper "How to kill creativity?" She said "Carry on doing what you are doing now."
Coming across the eGame "flOw" (go to http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/ ) I was surprised to see Csikszentmihalyi mentioned. His typical challenge-ability axes were shown, with anxiety above the challenge-ability match (challenge too difficult) and boredom below the challenge-ability match (challenge too easy).
I dabbled at the game and, after an immersive two hours. I created a creature from a basic amoeba. By working out how to get my amoeba to eat plankton it grew healthily, with many segments to its body. The creature is shown above.
The wonderful realisation is: I was choosing to organise myself, to deal with the amiguity of no rules in a game with no objective (other than my need to construct my own meaning), and slipping into a state of flow.
In an inchoate way I was pathfinding and generating heuristics to make sense of my explorations.
This is something the student Cara found with her project work. She chased up a comment I made a year ago, for she recognised the state she was in (i.e. flow) from what I said. Not playing a game - rather, working on a project, Cara still entered a state of flow. She was alive to what she was doing and was insensitive to time. She had become absorbed in her work. As I had become in feeding my amoeba to become the monster shown in the diagram above.
This idea of flow has implications for creative work and how it is managed. Creativity needs long stretches of time. It cannot be turned on and off like a tap. Current timetabling systems follow the "tap model". What did Amabile say in her HBR paper "How to kill creativity?" She said "Carry on doing what you are doing now."
posted by Dr Brian Morris at 6:55 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home