As I’ve thought about how to answer the way in which “thinking wrong and my heuristic biases have impacted my process of exploration thus far”, I have really struggled with knowing how to answer, until after I finished my final mind map. I had a lot more fun than I was expecting completing the final assignment, and feel as though a lot of the underlying ideas from weeks 2 and 3 (regarding the nature of creativity and free association, etc.) began to make a lot more sense. So as I think about these things, and why in particular it was enjoyable, a few things come to mind that actually directly relate to my heuristic biases and ‘thinking wrong’.

Since I have been trained as an architect, and work at a firm that does extremely modern, minimal buildings, and because my own design sensibilities are often oriented towards this kind of design practice, I normally have a pretty “strict” set of underlying rules about my work. Sometimes, this is great, and has produced some stuff I am proud of. Other times, however, it holds me back from making decisions in a more free sense that might, in the end, come out much better. So for this assignment, I tried my hardest to “think wrong” and leave my modernist heuristic biases as far behind as I could (although my poster was set in Neue Haas Grotesk so that gives you a clue about how much modernism I could let go of…haha).

In the end, I combined hand-drawn lettering for the three main words (drawn with a thick marker, scanned, treated in photoshop, then vector traced in Illustrator). My wife came home and was like “where did you get those fonts? I love them!” which was funny, because it was literally a 10-second scribble in my sketchbook (where I was intentionally trying to make the letterforms funny). Anyway, no grid on the poster. No common type size. Messy points of connection between lines. Nothing base-aligns. But it was fun! Definitely not normal for me, but I really enjoyed it, and would like to continue making “messy posters” in the future. I think conceptually this is very much like the mental process free association.