This is a good read:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/creativity-creep

I read it through the context of software product design… I liked this quote:

This watchful, inner kind of creativity is not about making things but about experiencing life in a creative way; it’s a way of asserting your own presence amidst the much larger world of nature, and of finding significance in that wider world. By contrast, our current sense of creativity is almost entirely bound up with the making of stuff. If you have a creative imagination but don’t make anything, we regard that as a problem—we say that you’re “blocked.”

XOXO is coming to Portland next week (a conference about creative people making stuff). I went the first year, then was a little weirded out that you had to apply to be invited the second year.

On my ride home yesterday I passed an open warehouse door and inside were 2 massive steel structures with swings hanging in them. They’re outdoor structures for XO. Curious to find out where they end up.