Creative Thinking
Creative Thinking: Strategies to Develop and Refine your Project Ideas
Online course by Node Center with Jennifer Dano
Duration: Apr 14 – May 5, 2015
Estimated effort: 3 hours weekly
Application deadline: Saturday, April 11, 2015
Every project we want to make or do starts with an idea, an impulse that is often inspired by a subject or question we are interested in exploring. But how can we make that initial idea the best it can be? This course will expose participants to a number of different strategies for research, development, and refinement of an idea while creating visual tools to track their ideation process.
This course is for curators, artists, designers, and anyone in the cultural fields wishing to make the creative process of developing concepts more effective and to arrive at ideas that would take their projects to the next level.
Following the course, participants will learn a range of creative thinking and research techniques, including practical and unorthodox research methods as well as visual tools to track their creative process. Participants will be able to apply these techniques to any number of project ideas, leading to the creation of each participant’s unique method that is suited to their specific practice and the needs of the project.
PROGRAM
Week 1: How to be a creative sponge
- Idea brainstorming techniques
- Mind mapping & other train of consciousness techniques
- Practical & unorthodox research strategies
- How to foster a creative attitude & atmosphere
- How/where to gather & keep this information
- Look at types of visual logs
- Daily activity: collect collect collect!
- Weekly activity: think big!
Week 2: Finding the needle in the haystack
- How to filter and archive all that is gathered
- Look at examples of this process
- Make new connections & find hidden threads
- Taking risks with idea development strategies
- Continue visual logs
- Daily activity: shaking out the gold from the sand
- Weekly activity: bringing big down to earth
Week 3: Putting the pieces together
- Analysis strategies to assess initial results
- Picking one or more ideas to further develop & refine
- Knowing when to keep looping back through the process
- Group critique past individual activities
- Continue visual logs
- Weekly activity: how can this be better?
Week 4: Fostering a creative practice
- Look at examples of post-production analysis
- Analysis of visual logs
- Group critique of individual work
- How to apply these strategies to a number of different tasks
- How to identify & develop your own individual practice
- Final Q & A
For further information, please visit: https://www.nodecenter.net/course/creative-thinking
