Bonnie Cook – Design Musings

Reflect on your own creative process. How do you strive to achieve a moment of performance or move forward in reach of a noble pursuit? Are your creative activities leading toward a moment of disruptive wonder for your audience, as well as for yourself?

Just within this quarter at SCAD, my creative process has changed dramatically as a reaction to the Kelli Anderson’s call for disruptive wonders and McLaren’s moment of performance and noble pursuit. An example is that I have spent the past 14 hours working on a project that could have easily taken me less than five if I had taken the easy/karaoke culture way out of it. For GRDS 701 I am creating a visual presentation for my research and rather than settling on a powerpoint presentation for my topic of “Graphic Design Storytelling,” I’ve created a miniature stage and illustrations on sticks that two young folks are going to help me perform tomorrow morning. It has been a work of labor and love, and while working on it, I was thinking about how much more powerful representing something in a new way is a pleasant disruption from the world of power points and other similar executions.

The fairy tale project (Exploration B) for GRDS 702 has also been a hot potato for me this week. The disruptive wonder in that project has been more guided (as we have been presenting the pieces of each stage and getting feedback) but it is shaping my future exploration methods. My project itself if a deviation from what is normal. It only has taken me three or four instances of someone asking me what the project is and me explaining it to realize the sheer complexity of the project parameters and what I am solving for. It is a leading example of the endless ways that the world’s ideas (and practices) can be shaken up and generated as something new.

For me, the most pleasantly surprising aspect of this journey has been realizing that these wonders and noble pursuits are all within the process. It is easy to look at the end result only and determine the disruptive wonder or moment of performance from there. The close introspection into the design and how every step is taken has allowed me a greater freedom to develop every nuance and control factors that have been mostly ignored within my creative process. Mind mapping has really helped me to see how to do this without feeling overwhelmed. Beyond that, taking the idea and applying it meaningfully has enabled me to see a really fascinating new view of a fairy tale that I have known for almost all of my life. Now I just want to do a good job executing it and have it reflect the finished product that is in my head! That is a noble pursuit in itself.