HOW TO MAKE MISTAKES ON PURPOSE

Artist, designer and author Laurie Rosenwald reveals her unique approach to coming up with ideas through unconventional creativity hacks and prompts, based on her popular workshop of the same name. She has been giving talks and running these workshops for 35 years at art and design schools and such major companies as Google, Ikea, TEDx, Adobe, and Starbucks.

How to Make Mistakes on Purpose is more than a book about where ideas come from or how to be creative; it's an entire philosophy of life. When you surprise yourself, you surprise others, and that is priceless in a world where everything seems to have been done.

This book is an entirely practical way to be creative, productive, innovative. No matter what your job is, it will give you a way to zag while everyone around you can only zig. But this is not "Ten Steps on How To Zag When Everyone Else is Zigging." It is based on making connections where others do not, on giving up perfectionism, of letting your mind wander freely, on giving in to the random, to giving in to human error instead of digital data or algorithms to figure out your problems.

So many cool things were discovered by mistake. Penicillin. Velcro. Post-it notes. Corn Flakes. Play-Doh. Pringles. The double-edged sword of sophisticated, industrialized know-how means that generations of highly trained workers are being molded into demanding, specific, result-oriented roles where they cannot mess up--and therefore they will never, ever innovate. If you can make mistakes on purpose, you can make the most of clever, useful computer programs and other technologies without sacrificing originality.

How to Make Mistakes on Purpose book is about bringing in the random to help you with whatever it is you need help with and bringing a little chaos to your order. You can't search for a surprise or an idea. You're only surprised when you make a mistake. This book is about putting yourself in a situation where your hypercritical demons are AWOL. It's about putting together disparate ideas and seeing where they overlap. It is exercises and inspiration to help you overcome your fear of the proverbial "blank page" as well as the literal one.

Using funny anecdotes and stories, examples from her own work in art and design, the mistakes of others that created wonderful things we all use, and some practical exercises and prompts, this is a colorful, inspiring guide to unleashing your creativity by letting go of expectations and your inner critic.

Laurie Rosenwald is a New York City-based illustrator, artist, designer, and book creator whose work is a mix of collage, drawing, painting, and storytelling. In addition to her many editorial illustrations for a wide variety of publications, Rosenwald has created animation, product design, and leads an ongoing workshop, "How to Make Mistakes on Purpose."

She has designed book jackets as well as books for Vintage, Little Brown, Houghton Mifflin, and Knopf. Her many illustration clients include the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper's, the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, The Believer, The Baffler and countless others. As a designer, Rosenwald has worked for Ikea, Sony Music, Warner Brothers, Target, the Sundance Channel, Noggin, Bloomingdale's, Barney's, Neiman Marcus, Ogilvy, Jay Walter Thompson, Bravo, Nickelodeon, Conde Nast, and The Whitney Museum. She is also the author of New York Notebook, All the Wrong People Have Self-Esteem, and And to Name Just a Few: Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue.