Tag Archives: Indonesia

People buy gas in an empty Absolut Vodka bottle

Absolut Vodka has offered many artists with a wide variety of collaboration opportunities. Now it has a long list of colors and shapes with much artistic flavour. Recently, it even introduced Absolut Colors saying that;

We are proud to once again dress our iconic bottle in the pride flag, originally designed by San Francisco-based artist Gilbert Baker in 1977, just before Absolut Vodka was born. For Absolut, we believe in the right to expression yourself in any way possible, which includes being able to love whomever you want to love. Creativity has always been at the core for Absolut, and diversity go hand in hand with that. A world where everybody is the same would not be any fun at all, but rather a quite boring place. That’s why Absolut is happy to have been celebrating a colorful world ever since 1979.

Interestingly, motor cyclists in Bali buy “petrols” in the Absolut Vodka bottles. These original bottles are prototype and seem to be the most appealing to many people there.

You will be able to think creatively in Bali

Ubud is a small town on the Indonesian island of Bali. “Eat, Pray, Love” was filmed in 2010 in this town. IMDb explains this movie;

A married woman realizes how unhappy her marriage really is, and that her life needs to go in a different direction. After a painful divorce, she takes off on a round-the-world journey to find herself.

Although not everyone needs to find himself or herself like a person in the movie, Bali is a perfect place to enjoy a mind wandering (taking a break involving an undemanding task) and to be creative. Indeed, in this town, many European visitors read and write books at cafes enjoying rice field views (to my surprise, rice fields can be scenic!). Some even go to a co-working space called Hubud and start their own businesses. I find many do undemanding tasks. Since residents are friendly, meals are delicious (Babi Guling at Ibu Oka), and guest houses are inexpensive, Bali is one of the destinations for those who need creativity.

Reference

Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W., Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by distraction: Mind wandering facilitates creative incubationPsychological science23(10), 1117-1122.

Although anecdotes that creative thoughts often arise when one is engaged in an unrelated train of thought date back thousands of years, empirical research has not yet investigated this potentially critical source of inspiration. We used an incubation paradigm to assess whether performance on validated creativity problems (the Unusual Uses Task, or UUT) can be facilitated by engaging in either a demanding task or an undemanding task that maximizes mind wandering. Compared with engaging in a demanding task, rest, or no break, engaging in an undemanding task during an incubation period led to substantial improvements in performance on previously encountered problems. Critically, the context that improved performance after the incubation period was associated with higher levels of mind wandering but not with a greater number of explicitly directed thoughts about the UUT. These data suggest that engaging in simple external tasks that allow the mind to wander may facilitate creative problem solving.