In his latest book, Creating Things That Matter: The Art and Science of Innovations That Last, David Edwards unveils elements essential to the creative process employed by the world’s best innovators. As a creator, writer, and educator, Edwards attributes his deep and persistent love affair with creativity to his father who took time to play with him, take his five-year-old world seriously, and believe in his dreams. Consequently, as an adult, Edwards has created breathable insulin, edible food packaging, and digital scents. Edwards is the founder of Le Laboratoire in Paris, France and later in Cambridge, Massachusetts where his culture lab includes the experimental restaurant Café ArtScience.

KEY POINTS

• Creating is highly expressive! It’s a way we learn, discover, and communicate.
• We need to create beautiful solutions to our challenges—solutions that are so compelling that we adopt them.
• Combining art and science is a process.
• Culture labs – a place for experimenting using the creator’s cycle (ideation, experimentation, and exhibition or expression)
• Within the culinary experience, Edwards finds rich opportunities to push the boundaries of serving and eating food, making it not just interesting but truly delicious.
• Healthcare needs to move out of the clinic and into everyday lives for it to be accessible.
• Aesthetics of creation have become essential to things that matter now and to those that will last over the long haul.
• Being mindfully aware of our own environment helps us see things afresh and can lead to surprising expression.
• Major creators tend to be quite generous, such as Danny Hillis, inveterate inventor of the universal “pinch-to-zoom” technology on smartphones.
• Richard Garriott, early game developer who wanted to embed morality into games
• The Grassroots Creators Movement (GCM) is giving all of us the ability to express ourselves.
• Makers and "Maker Faires" have proliferated. 

QUOTES FROM EDWARDS

• “Most things we create will not matter.”
• “Changing the human condition today will be harder than it was in ages past.”
• “Creation stirs within us the profound biological sense that we are not alone, that we are wired for relationships, and that we rely on each other for our mutual well-being.”
• “Making things that matter—not just to you or me—is fundamental to the survival of the human condition. It’s something our biology has programmed us to do.”
• “Creating what matters and has not existed before starts with what matters to us. We don’t create…by coercion. We create because we feel like it.”
• “Creators love frontiers because a frontier has no boundary.”
• “There’s nothing as fun as creating tomorrow.”
• “As creators, we all need a Florence…What we most lack is the oxygen, or culture, which can give people everywhere the confidence that what matters to them can matter to many others, and the guidance that point their aspirations in fruitful directions.”
• “Over the last decade, people have started to make things without being told they should and on a scale never seen before.”

BUY Creating Things That Matter: The Art and Science of Innovations That Last

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Watch David Edwards’s TEDTalk, “Eating Better with Digital Scent.”
• Learn more about the World Frontier Forum here.

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