Input - Process - Output

March 05, 2024 by Mitch Whitehead

There is a big funnel.

A huge, great, hungry thing.

Being endlessly shovelled into one end of this funnel are lots of “things.” Books, films, music, TV shows, articles, websites, podcasts, activities, memories, jokes, conversations, meals, experiences, art.

At the other end of the funnel, there is a tiny, little trickle.

The trickle is orders of magnitude smaller than the great gouts of stuff being hosed into the big end of the funnel. That trickle is the work that we produce - the things we write, the lessons we teach, the art we make. Whatever it might be. That’s not to say that everything we do in our daily lives is the output of this great funnel, it is the distilled creative product that we make.

On notebooks

January 26, 2024 by Mitch Whitehead

Notebooks have been a huge part of my personal and working life for as long as I can remember. Almost everything I do, whether it’s writing, designing, planning, or thinking, begins on paper in some way or another. I find the immediacy and freedom of pencil and paper to be something that’s completely intertwined with the way that I think and see things.

On The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

August 10, 2023 by Mitch Whitehead

Over the last few days, I’ve been making my way, slowly and intermittently, through Rick Rubin’s incredible book “The Creative Act”. A gorgeous, well-crafted, and thoughtful object in and of itself and a collection of short essays, even sometimes just a few paragraphs in length, all exploring the nature of creativity, the life of the creative person, and the act of creation itself. It’s been a deep pleasure to drop in on the book at different times and in different places and meander through these delicate, reflective passages.

New Forms of Learning: Lessons from the Strandbeest

June 08, 2023 by Mitch Whitehead

Skeletal, alien creatures roam wild on the beaches of The Netherlands. Tubular bodies and an array of legs skitter along the sand powered by great sails of white cloth and stomachs of plastic. These creatures have not come from some crashed meteor or alien spacecraft but from the mind of a Dutch inventor, artist, engineer, and creator - Theo Jansen.