http://www.ddc.dk/KALENDER/DDCudstillinger/se_lyset

flic

I picked up some books about exhibition design for inspiration, one in particular has some really interesting examples that are relevant to our theme. Some of the concepts are really interesting – one space is designed to reflect thought processes. Another one by Karim Rushid is designed to “offer unusual perspectives and points of view…” and goes on to describe how it also stimulates the senses and emotions. All sounding familiar!?!

Rather then scanning in all the images and posting it I’ll just bring the book in to show you guys tomorrow. 

It gave me a few ideas – I wondered whether we could design the space to reflect a general theme of “ideas” – and try to re-create in a visual way that experience when you suddenly get an idea – using strong lighting techniques – illuminating things… etc (how ideas and those “ah-ha” moments you get from the puzzles are often visually associated with light and illumination)

One visualisation I had just after class was what if we had the vinal covering the window except one circle where you can peek in and see a glimpse of the space – then inside it was all illuminated and colourful – completely different atmosphere to outside the room – If there was heaps of light coming from the roof – (like ideas and inspiration above), and then I thought we could have those big balls with lights in them we were talking about in class – in different bright colours – and they could represent thoughts – like thought bubbles! So the room was “full of ideas”… I wondered whether you could pull them down and read a puzzle on the side or something…. So yeh – lighting and colours and projections or whatever we want – could be used to create this “bright illuminated ambience” and the purpose of it is to create the experience of an idea – that moment you get one. 

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Posted by Deanna

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Definitions

— divergent thinking
Out-of-the-box thinking – thinking that moves away in diverging directions so as to involve a variety of aspects and which sometimes lead to novel ideas and solutions; associated with creativity. wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

“Creative people can free themselves from conventional thought patterns and follow new pathways to unusual or distantly associated answers. This ability is known as divergent thinking, which generates many possible solutions. In solving a problem, an individual proceeds from different starting points and changes direction as required, which Guilford explained leads to multiple solutions, all of which could be correct and appropriate.” Joy Paul Guilford

— convergent thinking
Thinking that brings together information focussed on solving a problem, especially solving problems that have a single correct solution. wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

— lateral thinking (thinking outside the square , thinking outside the square room maybe?)
A heuristic for solving problems; you try to look at the problem from many angles instead of tackling it head-on. wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Lateral thinking was a term coined by Edward de Bono, for the solution of problems through an indirect and creative approach. Lateral thinking is about reasoning that is not immediately obvious and about ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_thinking

“Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. It is concerned with the perception part of thinking. This is where we organize the external world into the pieces we can then ‘process’.” Edward de Bono

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Notes

– A Smile in the Mind: Witty Thinking in Graphic Design, Beryl McAlhone & David Stuart

/ “With 11 items of clothing there would be 39,916,800 ways of getting dressed… the brain [however] is designed to make patterns, use them and stick with them.” Edward de Bono

/ Wit is a combination of the familiar and the play, the familiar can be a visual cliché, graphic icon, well-known phrase, where as the play is agile thinking, a sideways jump with an unexpected outcome. The result is not derived through logic. A successful solution, combines familiarity with a big surprise.

/ The message must offer something that intrigues, that stops people in their tracks that they are seduced into reading. The recipient then becomes captive, willing to hear the message. “Wit can be the difference between a communication that is glanced at for 10seconds and one that is pored over for 10minutes.” Quentin Newark

/ Interactivity – invites the viewer to take part in the communication, the designer never travels 100% of the way, the audience may have to travel between 5-40% to unlock the puzzle – “The incomplete asks to be completed, the urge to understand is derived from an urge as basic as hunger.” Arthur Koestler

/ “Involvement seems to me to be everything in communication. If I do everything as the sender, the only thing left for the sender is to refute it.” Jeremy Bullmore

/ Questions to ask about the communication – is it memorable? Does the audience read it? How does it feel to get/understand the witty idea? “How familiar can it be so that it’s understood and yet how unusual can it be so that it’s engaging?” Milton Glaser 

– Unleashing Creativity, Ulrich Kraft

/ Today’s creativity experts look for certain characteristics that people who excel at divergent thinking seem to exhibit. The following are prime examples:

Ideational fluency – the number of ideas, sentences and associations a person can think of when presented with a word
Variety and flexibility – the diversity of different solutions a person can find when asked to explore the possible uses of, say, a newspaper or a paper clip.
Originality – the ability to develop potential solutions other people do not reach
Elaboration– the skill to formulate an idea, expand on it, then work it into a concrete solution
Problem sensitivity – the ability to recognize the central challenge within a task, as well as the difficulties associated with it
Redefinition – the capacity to view a known problem in a completely different light

/ “If you always think the way you always thought, you’ll always get what you always got–the same old ideas.”

/ “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” Thomas Edison

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Lateral thinking examples 

Q. How many sides does a circle have?
A. Two sides, the inside and the outside.
http://www.school-teacher-student-motivation-resources-courses.com/lateralthinking.html

Q. This is an unusual paragraph. I’m curious how quickly you can find out what is so unusual about it. It looks so plain you would think nothing was wrong with it. In fact, nothing is wrong with it. It is unusual though…Study it and think about it, but you still may not find anything odd about it. But, if you work at it for a bit, you might just find out.
A. The letter “e,” which is the most common letter in the English language, does not appear once in the long paragraph… http://wilk4.com/humor/humore14.htm

The nine dots puzzle
Q. Connect the dots by drawing four straight, continuous lines that pass through each of the nine dots, and never lifting the pencil from the paper.

A. The puzzle is easily solved, but only if you draw the lines outside of the confines of the square area defined by the nine dots themselves. Thus, the phrase “thinking outside the box/square”.

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More lateral thinking exercises/activities

http://www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/8295/lateral1.html
http://abundance-blog.marelisa-online.com/2008/12/21/lateral-thinking-think-out-of-the-box/
http://wilk4.com/humor/humore14.htm
http://www.school-teacher-student-motivation-resources-courses.com/lateralthinking.html
http://www.brainstorming.co.uk/quotes/creativequotations.html 

Edward de Bono
http://www.edwdebono.com/debono/lateral.htm
I’ve placed some books on hold at the library which may contain lateral thinking exercises/activities.

M.C. Escher
http://www.mcescher.com/

Alan Fletcher – The Art of looking sideways interview 
 

Do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html

Shigeo Fukuda

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More findings – Pdf files

Edward de Bono

Lateral thinking

Lateral thinking quotes

Thinking outside the box

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Posted by Deanna

So I found this on the Pearlfisher website, it’s pretty cool. I really like how the pencils have been displayed.

Scribble as long as you like – an exercise in meaning, by Johnson & Jarvis
The Pearlfisher gallery hosted an experimental interactive project that addressed alternative tools used for drawing. “Our space was transformed into a literal carte blanche as guests at the private view and onwards were invited to literally scribble away all over our walls with special metered pens to create a giant but delicate monochrome graffiti wall.”

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Posted by Deanna

http://www.fubiz.net/2009/04/16/3d-immersion-technology/

check out these – pretty cool. prob doesnt work for what we’re doing though :p

Anyway… Thanks Dee I thought the articles “Unleashing Creativity” and “How to unleash your creativity” were really interesting, very good find!! 

I really liked the idea about a space that stimulates the right side of the brain and inspires creativity, but as said in the “Unleashing creativity” article you cant actually isolate the right hemisphere and stimulate it: “The catch is that because the neural processes that take place during creativity remain hidden from consciousness, we cannot actively influence or accelerate them. It therefore behooves even the most creative among us to practice one discipline above all–patience.” BUT the article about “How to unleash your creativity” proposed some really interesting techniques which seemed to encourage people to “maximise” or “boost” their creativity. As said in the first article everyone is creative – and more importantly the creative process is “teachable and trackable”, and that people can “learn skills to boost creative output.” They examples put forward in the article were really interesting - 

Julia Cameron’s three skills for creative expression: 

1. morning pages

2. the artist “date” or “outing,” I call it—is to take an adventure once a week, which probably involves both broadening and challenging.

3. walk out the door for 20 minutes or so and see what happens to your thinking. When people walk, they often begin to integrate the insights and intuitions that they have had through morning pages and outings. 

Robert Epstein’s four different skill sets, or competencies, that  are essential for creative expression: 

“capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them. morning pages are a perfect example of a capturing technique.

“challenging”—giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas.

“broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things.

“surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become.

The examples of Dali taking breaks to promote creativity is definately something I can relate to I always come up with ideas just as I’m lying down for a nap!! 

Thinking back to what Mollerup said – that this project is still fundamentally a piece of Communication Design – I’m wondering whether we could use the space to inform people about creativity – give them a summary of “tips” of how to maximise their creativity, and provide examples (we could get most of this from the article). So our job would be to communicate these tips in a really creative way so people actually interested. Then we could use some of these mentioned ‘competencies’ and apply them to the space somehow – some of the examples you found Dee were really interesting.

Our primary communication objective could be: to encourage people to boost their creative potential by providing them with information about skills and techniques – and our role would be to visually inspire them to do this. 

Cant work out how it fits into Per’s communication model yet I’m still trying to understand what he was on about… 

Thoughts? 

Posted by Felicity Mitchem