creativity

Sir Ken Robinson argues, with humor and stories such as that of choreographer Gillian Lynne, that education systems undermine creativity and should be changed. It is one of the most viewed TED talks.

The Futur's guide to pricing design and creative work, arguing against hourly rates and for value-based pricing. It features Blair Enns and says to price the client, not the job.

Kirby Ferguson's video essay series arguing that creativity is built on copying, transforming and combining existing work. It covers music, film and technology, then turns to copyright and patents.

K Lars Lohn's PyCon 2016 keynote weaves together music theory, programming, biking road trips and fractals. It is a personal, wide-ranging talk rather than a Python how-to.

Kirby Ferguson's film argues that creativity is built from copying, transforming and combining existing works, examining music, film and technology. It makes the case that everything is a remix.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a cartoon character painting entirely from math, using signed distance fields in a Shadertoy shader. He explains each step of building the image from formulas.

Chris Ford builds up from a single sine wave through layered abstractions to a Bach canon, using Clojure and the Overtone audio environment. The talk shows music theory as a natural fit for functional programming.

Inigo Quilez live-paints a mountain landscape using only math in a shader, building up from a basic polynomial noise surface through fractal terrain, lighting and atmosphere. The code runs in real time on Shadertoy so viewers can edit it as they follow along.

Darius Kazemi's XOXO 2014 talk on releasing 72 weird internet side projects in a year. Framed as 'How I Won the Lottery,' it argues that success needs both luck and buying many tickets.

Dave Ackley demonstrates the Demon Horde Sort, an inherently robust sorting machine running in his Movable Feast Machine simulator. This is the uncut version with all details and side thoughts.

Allieway Audio gives an informal introduction and live-coding demo of ORCA, a free esoteric programming environment for building procedural sequencers from Hundred Rabbits. It walks through the interface and how to make music with it.

Herbert Wolverson's Roguelike Celebration 2020 talk surveying procedural map generation techniques, including integration of hand-crafted prefabs and vaults.

Rune Skovbo Johansen explains Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering, a technique he invented and released as open source. It makes dithering stick to 3D surfaces and covers the experiments and shortcomings along the way, inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn.

Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown shows his workflow for animating math videos with Manim, with Ben Sparks. He codes scenes live, including a Lorenz attractor, and walks through example scenes.

Johann Korndorfer's NVScene 2015 talk on building content with signed distance functions. It focuses on patterns that make SDF modelling more structured, arguing that SDFs capture a shape's essence like vector graphics do compared with polygons or voxels.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a painting using only mathematics in a shader, building it up step by step. The linked Shadertoy source shows the result.

Sam Aaron live codes an ambient electronic set using Sonic Pi, the music programming environment he created. The performance shows code driving music in real time.

Sam Aaron, creator of Sonic Pi, gives a demo-heavy GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on live coding music. He covers the history of Sonic Pi, how it evolved, and what it can do for education and professional musicians.

Ed Catmull of Pixar speaks at Stanford's 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference on running a creative company. He argues for surfacing small problems early and building good teams, with stories like the Toy Story 2 crunch.

Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture covers his career at Xerox PARC and how to think about inventing the future. He goes through what came out of PARC and why companies fail to capitalize on such ideas.

Part two of Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture on inventing the future. He draws on his time at Xerox PARC and elsewhere to discuss how to think about new technology and what makes ideas useful.