Open Your Eyes!

The Art of Looking.

Week 2: The days topic; Creativity!!

Creativity.

A word that is thrown around a lot in design lately. ‘Boost your creativity!’, ‘Unlock your Creative side’, ‘Embrace your creativity’, ‘Re-discover your creative nature’.

It is very easy to get lost in all that is going on at the moment, but what does it actually mean?

Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Creativity is characterised by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions.

The above is a formal definition, it makes sense. Everything can be defined these days, however one of the objectives of the class was to throw away modern and learned conventions of ‘making sense’. Why not lay on your back in the middle of a lecture hall where you would typically be sat silent and ‘paying attention’.

This is exactly what we did, we looked at a typical room with chairs and people from an angle that we wouldn’t normally. Our point of view now being upside-down was incredibly freeing, seeing details of things, that in everyday life would be overlooked.

This was amplified by a piece of paper that we had cut a square hole out of. It was our ‘view-finder’ or ‘magnifying glass’. As we walk around we take in a huge amount of sensory information, sights, smells, tastes and even feelings of textures. It’s quite a lot that we are constantly processing, our brains have gotten quite good at allowing us to gloss over the detail. We take it for granted because we see it every day or because we are solely focused on where we need to be. Taking the time to look around only through our ‘view-finder’ was interesting. Seeing only a tiny portion of what we might usually, it makes you more aware of what we might miss out on, as we go about life glued to our screens.

I have made it a personal mission to not be on my phone as much when I go from one place to another, attempting to take in as much detail from the world around me as I can. Dreaming up stories for how things might have come to exist where I find them. Looking at everyday objects and trying to figure out the process someone went through to design it, how it was installed where it is. Take for instance the building work that is going on around the campus at the moment. Some might view it as an inconvieneacnce, I do too from time to time, but more often than not I enjoy catching a glimpse of what it takes to make things the way we see them.

This was my main takeaway from the class, perspective is everything. We are the busiest we have ever been as humans. Everyone has a unique view of the world, I think its more fun to walk through it, picking up and putting on a different set of glasses to look at the same things. To allow myself to be ever more curious and not become complacent in my existence. I would encourage you to give it a go and see what you think.