April 3rd - creativity part two

 We began taking a look at the chair project, round one period the goal of this piece was to transform a simple foamcore chair in an amazing and personal way.

We briefly talked about creative moments that have been observed in the past seven days.

We listened to a 20 minute audio by creativity expert, Shakyi Gawain. There was a hand out with notes on her talk, and a list of questions, including things like present, and future creativity. Specifically, there was a question asking each of us to imagine what it would be like to make a good living doing something we intrinsically enjoy spending our time on.

After the break, we briefly discussed the principle of lateral thinking, and as an example of lateral thinking, we saw video clip of an individual who makes huge, but temporary, drawings on the beach sand.

We did a classic brainstorming exercise called Crossing the chasm.

After that, we attempted to solve a pressing individual problem, using an exercise called "Visiting Ancient Egypt."

The assignments for the next class meeting, which is in two weeks, include:

1) making an evil twin version of the chair project

2)"Flotsam + Jetsam" chair project-- and making a series of found object chairs, which are actually only tiny sketch models, of junk from the beach or an alley quickly turned into simple abstractions of chairs.

INSTRUCTIONS: step one: go to a place of abundant flotsam and jetsam. Comb the beach, or its urban equivalent, such as an alley, and gather whatever small bits of castoffs in debris you find. This might include fragments of weathered glass, parts of Styrofoam cups, little bits of metal, or scraps of wood.  Step two: get a glue gun, some white glue, some tape, possibly an exact a knife and scissors, and very quickly and without any concerns about craftsmanship, combine the sound bits of debris into small chair like objects. These only need to be an inch or two tall. The image shown above is of some sketch model chairs, by artist, Lucas Samaras.

Strive for quantity and variety, rather than quality or craftsmanship.

3)Finally, there was a handout from the book "Lateral Thinking", which is to be completed before our next on-campus meeting.