Paths For Creativity

When you are curious about something or embark on a project, your primary access point is when you first begin to understand something, but you want to keep digging further. It‘s like a building with many sub-basements.: You can descend through them, but they gradually get darker and murkier—and what you find there is perhaps in a state of extreme decay—what Robert Macfarlane calls the Underland--with few other access points or escape hatches, except back to where you began. This is how most projects proceed: The favored access point is always the one that gets used and produces the same kind of material with expected results.

The ideal, for all things that you want to be innovative (or just different for you), is to choose a good access point, and decide whether the work will have a convergent or divergent methodology. This usually involves some trial and error before you go through the access point blindly. Typically, the good access points are not easily accessible, and they have to be "cleared" beforehand. Sometimes your access point is covered in heavy boulders. Then, do you still want that access point, or take the easy way?