New Term, New Brief! Innovation and Creativity

For the second term of University, I was set an entirely new brief where I was given a 2 week period to complete research and ideas on the topics of innovation and creativity.

Through my initial research, I found that innovation was 'the ability to generate new ideas or to restructure and redeploy old ones'. Also, a lot of innovation has been centred around new technologies created by man. This led me to think of how I could innovate my own practice and perhaps look into personal past projects to see how I could re-invent them in new, innovative ways. Themes that immediately sprung to mind were modern day political issues, experimentation, superstitions, and editorial design for magazines. However, even with these initial thoughts, nothing seemed to really grab my attention for a starting point for the project.

Group Tutorial with Ian Massey: 23rd January 2014

In the group tutorial, we were asked to present our initial ideas about the theme of innovation. However, as I was not clear about which direction to take with the project, I listened to others to try and gain some inspiration. 

After hearing others responses to the brief, I decided that as one starting point I could look into the link between nature and innovation. This interested me in the sense that on the surface, natural forms do not seem to have a part in this kind of modern innovation and are unable to innovate themselves. This led me to think about adaptation and evolution. 

Another idea that came to mind was the link between innovation and the subconscious and so I asked myself, can innovation be accidental? This triggered me to think about how I have experimented with media, made 'happy accidents' due to mistakes, and how I often find myself thinking up new ideas at random intervals where I am not consciously making a decision i.e. the shower! These subconscious thoughts have often directed my projects or at least given me starting points! 

Therefore, I found the group tutorial with Ian Massey a major help as now I have at least a couple of ideas to start off my research into the new brief!

Illustration Tutorial 10.10.13

Group tutorial with Ian Massey.

In my first tutorial I presented my initial primary source photographs and expressed my initial idea to create my own narratives from the numbers I found in the environment. Also, i could use the idea of association to help me look at new ways of interpreting numbers to aid me in making new illustrations with various narratives .

I gained positive feedback and suggestions from my peers. One idea was to perhaps look at historical sites which contain numbers and create illustrations based on the true story behind the dates and names. Another was use numbers as information and out of context to create new narratives.

After the tutorial I felt more positive about continuing in the direction I was heading. My person target is to continue taking primary source photography of numbers in the surroundings and look into number association to see what imagery I can create.