C.D.C BLOG WEEK 2: Open Your Eyes

“The art of looking & creativity”. This Workshop’s objective is to refine your creative skills, expand your perception and look at life as exciting and transformative.

During our second week of our contemporary design culture module we pondered on the Art of creativity, are you creative and can you learn to be creative.

To delve into my personal thoughts in relation to creativity was captured excellently in one of the pdf slides from the class.

Creativity is: “The Systematic, solution-directed search for new ways of doing things.”

I believe everyone is born either left or right brained

Left being “analytic linear strategic practical realistic the mathematician or scientists.”

Everything in order and done via the standard process following rues.

Right being: Curious Creative intuitive the desire to paint on an empty canvas art dreamers poets explorers of new methods and ideas.

Its my opinion that everyone is born at some distance on this spectrum between the sides. With some mix of both sides everyone is there own mashup with some leaning towards structure function and maths while others flow into the creative chaos.

A perfect example I can relay to support this would be looking at two friends of mine both UL students , one Matthew McClay and Dylan martin both to polar opposites on the spectrum of brain side and in turn creativity. McClay as right minded as it gets veteran mathematic scholar with calculator like speeds to maths equations a man of a set mind with little space for persuasion from his set belief. Then there is dyl his style as best to describe as groovy with vibrant colours and healthy mulet, a man of open mind and with a creative spark more akin to roaring flame a gifted artist in terms of phot design and editing.

Im sure if you look at your own life and surroundings youll notice in other people and yourself and where they lie on that line.

And that brought us to the point of can you learn to be creative, I believe you can learn to a expand your creativity but only to max extent of your left side brain involvement , that’s my best attempt at explaining my view on the matter. If you only naturally use half of your creative outlook but then are helped in realizing your full creative potential you could still be well short of another persons level on the left brain scale.

To finalize the class we ventured to towards developing our own creative process and mindset as was the aim of the lecture. We were tasked with group work to come up with the best worst idea , the exercise helped us explore options we would never usually consider how to make things worse. The best our group could muster being frozen cutlery . Ice cutlery that would melt with the various heats of dinners. Something so absurd and unconventional. I enjoyed the exercise and the slides had my brain turning

-Jake Doyle