Michelle Wolfarth's Blog

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?

I’ve been reflecting a lot this week about creative process for this class, as well as GRDS 701.  What I’ve really learned is that each creative process is unique depending on the person.  We can’t expect all designers to fall into a perfectly outlined process and always expect the most creative outputs.  Through all of our readings this quarter, some processes are centered on moments of frustration, possibilities of unexpected meanings, trying to shock, inspire or question the things around us.  For me, my creative process seems to always be changing.  I always start out the same with sketching, but I have found that most of my creative process is done away from my desk, my office, my computer and even my house.  I always find it essentially to understand who I am striving to design for and the more I research what has been done successfully and unsuccessfully to solve these problems the more I begin to formulate what I want to do.  Like I wrote earlier, a large part of my creative process is done outside; watching people, watching nature, just observing what surrounds me.  While I might be designing something for a computer screen, I may find inspiration from someone walking their dog.  It is through this observation exploration that I realized that I enjoy a disruptive wonder for both the audience and myself.  I enjoy finding a solution that seems so obvious that I wonder “wait, has someone done it before?”  I enjoy moments that make people stop and think and as often as possible, make them laugh.  I enjoy my creative to be fun, interactive and inquisitive.  These are the moments I strive for because I do think design plays a huge role in how we feel on a day to day basis.

What I have learned the most during this unit is that values are equally important as design skills.  We are all inevitably influenced by our values.  For example, I know that I like my design experiences to be fun, open and filled with a lot of conversations with others.  When I get to engage in these activities during my creative process I find that ideas come quicker and my ability to explore is easier.  These are the moments I find the most joy in design, so I try to make sure that each project, whether at school, or at work, is centered around enjoying the process.  I know when I’m not enjoying it, I won’t be creative.  When I’m not enjoying it, it feels like a job not a design opportunity.  While I never really thought about this as a creative value, but more a personal value, I have learned that when the two merge I find more passion in my design and more desire to make it better.

Kelli Anderson’s video this week was probably one of my favorite I’ve watched all quarter in any of my classes.  It was interesting, at first, I was kind of bored and was thinking “Ugh, this is going to be a long video.”  But, then she started talking about her theory of disruptive wonder and show how she approached this in her creative life.  I loved it!  It was one of those moments when you think, gosh, I wish I had designed that.  What I liked the most about how Anderson described things was it was light-hearted.  Oftentimes when I read, or listen to people talk about shaking things up, it always seems to be in a more aggressive manner.  Anderson was fun, she made me laugh and it inspired me to want to follow her guidance in my own creative process.  I am completely open to disruptive wonder and would love for it to be part of my creative process.  I feel like disruptive wonder is what graphic design is all about, it’s not just about doing what people ask, but adding a little spice into the ordinary brochure, website, or business card.  This isn’t completely new notion to me, but I have to admit it was the first time that I actually felt the desire to want to try harder.  Again, I loved Anderson’s approach to design and I admired the level of fun and joy she expressed in each example.

The most successful process during Exploration A was brainstorming with my classmate Laurel.  While we were not assigned partners, we checked in with each other throughout the project.  In my day-to-day job I rarely get to take the time to brainstorm, particularly with others, mostly just with clients.  While it’s very helpful to brainstorm with clients, I found it so refreshing to brainstorm with other designers.  I didn’t have to explain everything too much and the ideas we bounced off each other pushed my creative process.  It was great!  I think the element that was missing the most was a clear understanding of what I wanted to do.  I never really felt like I grasped this exploration.  Perhaps it was the fact that we had no constraints and that is a foreign thing to me constantly working with clients.  I always have guidelines and then I work within them.  I also think I got stuck on one concept and found it difficult to go outside that idea when I realized it may not work, I just kept trying to figure out how to solve the design problem within my idea instead of maybe just going in a different direction.  While I understand we have to work within the timetable of the school quarter, I also think it would have been helpful to spend less time picking words and expanding on the list of words and allowing more time to brainstorm with our classmates.

I have to be honest that I have really been struggling with Exploration A during this quarter.   I haven’t felt inspired, but confused and unsure of what the project is about.  I found myself talking through things with my classmates and posting sketches, but it still felt boring and expected.  I was ready to just throw my hands up and then I read an article for GRDS 701 Bootcamp Bootleg that presents new ways of design thinking.  I read through the article prepared to write a blog entry for my other class about it and found myself stopping my blog entry to brainstorm for Exploration A.  Ideas were racing through my mind and I kept flipping the pages of my sketchbook to try and get down the images in my head.  It was great!  I finally felt “unstuck” and inspired to share it with one of my partners that was feeling a similar frustration.  We went through some of the different design thinking methods and caught ourselves saying “Oh! What if you tried this!”  or “Wouldn’t it be cool if it did this.”  I felt so relieved after our last brainstorming session and perhaps what I will turn in will actually be good!

As I sat down to read through some of the other discussion posts and saw our original Unit 1 discussion questions about Creativity and Design Process, particularly Jonah Lehrer’s video that poses the idea that the creative journey begins with a moment of frustration.  When I originally responded to the post I didn’t agree with that statement, but after our assignments in Exploration A, I would most definitely agree with the idea the journey starts with frustration.  If I hadn’t been so frustrated, I would not have stepped away and reconsidered new ways of approaching my design opportunity.  Then I started to think, perhaps all of our exercises up this point was to get us to this level of frustration that we then force our old ways of design thinking to submitting and making way for new opportunities.  Whether that was the goal of the exercises up to this point I have not idea, but I do have to admit that my brainstorming would not have been as productive if I hadn’t felt that level of frustration.

Working on our Project A play and exploration lessons has been so interesting.  I think what has intrigued me the most is the “blind” factor behind each exploration.  We don’t know what the end product will be, or what the goal the end product may produce.  It’s a very foreign concept from my day to day job where there is always a clear goal established before I start creating.  I know the problem I’m trying to solve and it drives my creative process.  For Project A, I just take it one step at a time and I have no restrictions for my thought process.

What I also thought was interesting was to build on the other students lists; read through the words they wrote and see the same, or different, direction I may go.  It made me stop and wonder what made someone come up with that word, and also examine what made me go in another direction.

I’m so excited to see what is going to be next with the projects and how we will build off our first three exercies.