Week 2 Development of Creative Thought Essay

The first principle that I want to look at is the process of getting rid of assumptions. This is the act of approaching projects with an open mind so that you can make new observations and connections, and therefore be more creative with your work. The basis of this would be to challenge your understanding of everything that you are working with and break it down to it’s most basic level. Question what a word exactly means, what it could mean, what it could be interpreted to mean. Think about alternative ways of using existing techniques. For example, you could use a method of work such as Japanese woodblock printing, and then colour it in photoshop, creating a very different style.

Yuko Shimizu, 7 Deadly Disasters. Shimizu uses the Japanese woodblock and photoshop method mentioned above

Related to the above principle, is Restating Problems. ‘Problems’ here does not necessarily mean that there is difficulty or an obstacle involved (though there is in the example I’ll be using), it simply refers to a question or brief to be answered or an objective to be reached. The idea is that you come into a problem from a different approach than either you did initially or you would normally in order to give yourself more options. This increases the likelihood of you producing more creative and original ideas. For example, one of the projects on my foundation course required that we (in groups of 4 or 5) set up a themed mini exhibition based on objects that we had been looking at previously. As the theme was an essential part of the brief, and all of our objects were totally unrelated, we used a different approach. Instead of trying to think how the objects could be related, we thought about why it is that they are all unrelated. What we came up with was that all of the objects were similarly out of context where we found them, and no longer held much, if any meaning in our time. The theme we chose therefore, was decay, thinking of the decay of meaning behind these objects.

Documentation of the exhibition we set up