Ideas, Ideas, and more Ideas.

Last Friday's afternoon session about ideas generation was really more helpful than I had first thought. Taken from exercises used a Central St Martins in London, the exercises involved a series of mind-mapping tasks to inspire ideas that when you simply sit down with a pen and paper might not come to you. Some of the tasks included ten things to do with a tin can, merchandise for the anti-royalist in the approach to the Queen's diamond jubilee, and what would the bottle look like for a bottle full of happiness. At first I had reservations as to how these would benefit me, but after I got past these having a specific theme for ideas, made the ideas seem to flow much easier. 


 My ideas for a tin can included bracelet's, a flower pot, makeup brush holder, earrings and many more. For the Anti-royalist merchandise my main idea was to have a series of tee shirts with different anti-royal slogans such as 'you don't have to be a queen to wear diamonds' and also some toilet paper with the Queen's face on it.And for the bottled happiness, I chose a bottle that represents something that makes me happy, a dog, my bottle was shaped like a happy looking dog. All seemingly simple ideas, but when put under pressure with a time scale you really have to focus hard to produce something relevant to the brief. 

Since this session, I went out and bought some big paper and pens, and sat down to begin ideas generation for the up coming project brief. I probably would have used the mind-mapping technique as a starting point, but having not done the activities in the session, I have to say the ideas produced would not have been as vast as they were having undergone the session. 


After having a lot of ideas about creative ideas, I began doing some research into how to be creative and how to keep creativity alive, which led me to a series of motivational videos online. 

Now I have my doubts that you can watch something and be instantly motivated to get out there and 'change the world', but at the very least these videos did make me smile, and get me thinking that maybe if I truly want something to happen, then maybe it can. I find myself watching one, which then will lead me to another one that I find interesting, and so on, and  have been dipping in and out of videos like this whilst researching for other things!