Day off today.

And with a supplement in the newspaper today covering 'creativity', it seems as good a moment as any to mention the conference on creativity that I attended last week.

Went with a former colleague as we were 'tabling' a paper. Not quite presenting but a step down - we were under instructions to lead a 40 minute discussion (and yes, a table would be present). We were a little taken aback whilst there to discover that most of the tabled paper sessions were a little more formal and that people did present their material briefly as not everyone attending the session could be guaranteed to have read it. Still, I had nothing better to do at 4.30am when I couldn't sleep, than prepare a mindmap which would aid in 'presenting' it informally. Lesson #1 be ready to present your work even if you've not been asked to.

We were also a bit taken aback to discover almost accidentally just minutes before we left that our work had been amongst those selected when so many hadn't. No case of them taking "just any old thing" then. As we didn't have formal research or quantitative results or anything to show, we just 'enthused' about some of the process of creativity in our jobs and lives (the crossover between the two, how fun it all was and yet how it contributed to 'academic' work we'd produced), it seemed almost fraudulent. As though the emperor would be found to have no clothes. But strangely we may yet be invited back to present our work (and more?) to library staff at the university hosting the conference.

And we were more than taken aback by the formal, academic nature of the conference. I don't know, I think somehow we'd imagined that there would be a little more, urh, creativity in the presentations rather than reports of creativity that had happened. Which is why we were even more determined to get colored pencils out, do something, or even show the marvellous clip from the movie Apollo 13 (which we happened to have on us) where the ground team are expected to work out a way of fitting one kind of CO2 scrubber into another to save the astronauts.

But all that's not to say it wasn't an excellent conference from organization to content and from social aspects to food and more. One of the highlights was Bob Sternberg from Tufts (fomerly of Yale) giving a top notch keynote address. (One of the low lights was the embarrassingly poor introduction he had). The program was dense with little time to breathe but it would have been impossible to come back without all sorts of information, inspiration and ideas.

I don't think it's an annual event; but what a shame!