The Arist in Me

I've never thought of myself as much of an artist. After today, that hasn't changed. Carlos had us do a few exercises to spur creativity in drawing skills. I've never been much of a good artist so I didn't have very high hopes. One thing I think I took away from this is that I did end up doing better than I had expected.

This is pretty important because it represents the lesson that I can't be creative with something new all the time. Sometimes I may need to resort to something I haven't done in a while and see what kind of progress I had made. Despite not drawing something particularly good, I still was able to create.

Sometimes I think I get too stuck trying to create something novel that I pass up an idea that I should just be re-visiting.

Lotus Blossom

So today E'xander gave his presentation on... The Lotus Blossom Technique. It was a a pretty clever brainstorming tactic that is used to nurture divergent thinking. I actually really like this as it forced me to really think outside the box. Rather than finding one branch of a brainstorming web and running with it, it forces you to synergize between subjects and try all of your branches out.

The actual sheet that we used looked a little complicated, but I feel that I can get some real use of of it if I just follow the general concept of the Lotus Blossom.

Skit Idea

Emo Exercises

Bam... More later.

UPDATE: Going to use in V2R

Ultimate Capture the Frisby

I usually don't get a chance to go outside and play a game but it was exciting to realize that it could help me be more creative. The information that Janie brought to the class was very interesting to me. The fact that exercise and playing games can increase levels of creativity can be very useful to me in the future.

I'm definitely going to be using this skill when I'm trying to come up with new ideas.

Thinking outside the Box

Brent's presentation on thinking outside the box was a lot of fun. I don't play many games like we did during his exercises. I feel like I could use a lot of work to enhance my creative mind. There was a lot of good practice here in divergent thinking. From the exercises we had with thinking of alternate uses to the mad libs. It was a good use of creativity for all those participating.

The presentation itself was a good example of creative thinking as well. Especially the adaptation of a song from The Lion King used as a Madlibs template. I also feel like these exercises apealed to several different means of being creative.

Stress Project

My idea originally started with Carlos and I filming clips of "video journals" from several people about their college stresses. It turns out, without exploiting people's personal lives, there is no way to make this interesting.

In order to stay creative, I think we have a new idea. The plan is still to do a video production, only now it won't be a documentary. It's going to be a sketch comedy film. We want to have a few clips that could go together into a 15 minute episode.

This is going to be a different kind of project because we have to write out scripts for all our sketches. I've had a few ideas in the past that I wanted to film, now I have a good reason to nurture those ideas.

MIdterm Reflection

This year I have done a lot to enhance my creativity. Starting with my Fall semester, I learned a lot of new techniques to allow myself to be creative. I do feel that the educational system has not nurtured this trait in engineering, but I also feel that it's very important.

I'm happy to have learned from my fellow students about new things and branch out. I really think that this semester's course is a great idea. It's been so cool thus far seeing how people take on the task of teaching the class something creative. It's evident that everyone has a different style of teaching and a different prefered channel of creativity. Being exposed to all of this in one class is great for enhancing my ability to be creative.

Creative Thoughts

I've noticed a few things that I could use in my daily life. They seem to be things that could be written as programs for the iPhone that are not available at the moment. I really hope to have the time to create these and be the person who releases them.

I wont have time until I finish with school, so let's just hope that nobody else comes up with it first.

A Brainstorm

In our class today we tried a new technique for generating ideas. Basically, you pass around a stack of note-cards to a group and people can chose to expand on the idea or use a new card and write something new down. It was really effective. We had so many ridiculous things by the time we got to the end of it.

It was a great way to diverge our thoughts and come up with a lot of unique ideas. I have trouble doing this sometimes on my own and found this technique really useful to me. The only downside is how many note-cards that are used.

Stencils

Yesterday in class I learned a lot about stencil graphiti. I've seen a lot of that kind of work before but I hadn't seen some of the really cool works that were shown in class.

It's often seen as an obstruction to the normal order of things, but it can be a wonderful artform. The examples shown not only looked very interesting, but the locations became important as well. Major social mesages were sent through the art.

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When I Have Time

I think it's a cool idea to try and port one of my OpenGL programs to Objective-C and then to the iPhone SDK. A good way to play around with the interface. Not practical app but fun.

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What I Envision

So thinking it would be an interesting project to follow the lives of a couple students at U of I and look at how stress effects them. Probably get a few different majors to show a contrast. I've been very interested in doing a video project and I am also stressed out a lot and would like to look into how it effects students.

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Trial From Lifecast!

Just seeing how well this works. No landscape. :(

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