Brian Eno has cemented his legendary status in music about ten times over. He was a founding member of Roxy Music, created at least 3 classic solo albums before becoming bored of conventional rock music and subsequently inventing ambient music. He’s produced David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads and Coldplay among countless others. He pioneered generative sound software, composed the famous Windows startup sound, and worked as an activist for political and environmental causes. He is rock music’s foremost public intellectual, and his work ethic puts most people to shame. How does someone so prolific come up with so many original ideas?

Eno’s ability to generate novel approaches to creative dilemmas may be his most vital attribute as a creative thinker. Virtual Dj Pro 6 Download Full Version. In the 1970s he devised a method for discovering new creative possibilities, which came to be known as the Oblique Strategies. The appeal of the Oblique Strategies is that they are useful not just to artists and musicians, but to anyone adventurous enough to seek unexpected insights when dealing with uncertain outcomes. Together with an artist named Peter Schmidt, Eno created a deck of cards that could be consulted whenever a mental obstacle is encountered.

Each card features a direct instruction for how to proceed. The cards are meant to encourage lateral thinking (often referred to in business as ‘thinking outside the box’). Speaking about the Oblique Strategies to San Francisco-based KPFA radio in 1980, Eno said: “The Oblique Strategies evolved from me forgetting that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn’t the case.

The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, ‘Don’t forget that you could adopt this attitude,’ or ‘Don’t forget you could adopt that attitude.’” The cards are open-ended but offer direct advice: Honor thy error as a hidden intention. Breakthrough ideas often begin as mistakes. Perhaps you’ve been hitting the wall as you try to achieve an intended result. By treating the mistaken result as your desired outcome, you could make a discovery you would never consciously have arrived. Would anyone want it? Entrepreneurs have to have vision, but sometimes that vision can be myopic.

What's more, the app also allows you to send the print job to your Mac as a JPG or PDF, or if you use Dropbox, directly to your Mac's Dropbox folder. Modelled on the “Oblique Strategies” deck of cards created and originally published back in 1975 by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, this app presents a set of cards that,.

It’s important to be empathic and consider, is this a good idea? Will anyone want this product or service? The bare bones of Google Glass contain some very cool, futuristic ideas, but perhaps no one at Google took the time to consider whether anyone would want it. Perhaps you’ve been too methodical and organized.

What would happen if you tried to accomplish your task in 1/4 the time? Maybe rather than focusing on launching your company with the finished version of your offering, you should consider launching with an MVP (minimum viable product) to allow you to continuously improve and iterate via customer feedback. Not building a wall but making a brick. Do you have total situational awareness of what you’re working on? Perhaps by reframing an aspect of your work, you can better understand its significance in the whole.

A single ingredient vs an item on the menu vs the entire menu vs the dining experience vs your brand vs your neighborhood vs food culture at large. There are several different editions of the cards available.. Ibert Flute Concerto Program Notes Examples. An online version can be found here: The Oblique Strategies are part of a long tradition of lateral thinking techniques. The basic principle behind lateral thinking is that by approaching a problem from a different angle, we may be able to find better solutions. Utilizing imagination and inspiration to generate unexpected solutions to the problems you face means not simply going for the obvious solution. There’s rarely only one solution to the problem. Ideas should not compete against each other, but instead should clarify our methods until we have chosen the optimal solution for an individual problem.

Edward de Bono, a creativity expert and the inventor of the term ‘lateral thinking’, sums it up in saying, “Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.” The Oblique Strategies are a trapdoor for stale ideas. Techniques encouraged by the Oblique Strategies are taught to children at Montessori and Waldorf schools, to future professionals at Stanford, Harvard and in the MIT Media Lab.

They are championed by people like Richard Branson and at organizations like Pixar, but they’re not fancy or unattainable or expensive. It doesn’t cost anything to think differently about the problems facing your business. But it could cost dearly not to.

More from Bond Street: • • •.

Over the last few years, Berlin's beloved have been intensely busy. Much of their time has been spent working concurrently on various projects, releasing around a dozen studio albums over the last five years. During this latest phase of the ongoing supporter project they set themselves a goal of producing an album over the course of a year, one song a month as a gift to those who were helping to fund their forthcoming album, Alles Wieder Offen. With three 'bonus' tracks thanks to the phase lasting a few months longer than intended, the 15 Jewels are quite unlike Neubauten's entire back catalogue. Even the frequently challenging releases of the Musterhaus project do not prepare me for the sheer freedom expressed by the band. The songs were all written using the same template: Blixa Bargeld would compose the lyrics from dreams he had recorded in his diary (which vary in content from the plain strange to the utterly paranoid) and the music would be improvised based on the Dave system. The Dave system is similar to Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies cards: each of the cards features a word or phrase that encapsulates a particular mood, technique, or concept from the world of Neubauten (compiled by Bargeld while listening through the band's archives).

Every band member takes a number of cards and uses the phrases written on them to find a role within the song. Despite using the same basic premise for each song, each song is vastly different to the others. Each song is its own world, a microcosm complete unto itself and replete with its own character and particular instruments. Surprisingly, despite each song being created in complete isolation from the others, the 15 tracks hang together wonderfully as an album. Breaking free from their usual routine, they embrace instruments and rhythms that have not normally been part of their canon; the electronic approach to both the nightmarish 'I Kissed Glenn Gould' and the bizarre 'Vicki' is completely at odds with anything Neubauten have produced previously.

There is also an international vibe to the album (much like the Tabula Rasa triptych) with lyrics ranging from the usual German to Chinese, Hungarian, Greek and English. 'Jeder Satz mit ihr hallt nach' shares its name with an improvisation from their 1997 tour (and released on the Gemini download only live album) but is musically unconnected, there is an almost lounge feel to this new song which is a million miles from the original. It is not all new musical vistas and textures.

'Die Ebenen Werden Nicht Vermischt' is typical of Neubauten's most recent output. However, it does stick out amongst the more adventurous songs on the album. Its extended length (approaching 7 minutes compared to the 1.5-3 minutes that the others last) and rhythmic structure would have made it fit perfectly on 2005's Grundstueck album.

Other songs contain some elements of familiarity but shoehorned in with an unusual approach. 'Magyar Energia' is a mishmash of familiar techniques and instrumentation with unconventional delivery, especially the joyous anti-nuclear power football terrace chant towards the end.

Jewels may not run as smoothly as their previous albums as there is no obvious underlying concept to thread the songs together. Despite this, it is a fantastic album, especially considering it is meant as token of thanks to those who have provided financial support to record and release the band's forthcoming album. Hopefully these songs will make it into the band's live repertoire and more importantly get a release outside the supporters' project. For now, they are only available to subscribers to as both mp3 and uncompressed downloads. However, considering this album is the appetiser to the main course, it is well worth the price of admission while the oppertunity lasts. Samples: • • • Last Updated on Saturday, 18 April 2009 03:41.