Creative Thinking: Strategies to Develop and Refine your Project Ideas

Online Course by Node Center with Gloria Zein

Duration: Oct 15 – Nov 12, 2020
Fee: 154€
Max seats: 30
Enroll before: Oct 10, 2020
Dedication: 3 hrs/week

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 5 week 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. The course’s expanded length of time will allow for participants to get deeper into their creative thinking process.

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

Session 1: The basics of creative thinking

• Introductions
• In-class activities: Steps of creative problem solving
  • Define your goal / problem sensitivity
  • Idea brainstorming techniques
  • Mind mapping & other train of consciousness techniques
  • Perseverance
• How/where to gather & keep this information
• A brief introduction into the theory of creative thinking
  • A theory of thinking modes
  • A theory of problem types
  • Why and how design thinking works
• Learning from artists: One thing leads to another
• Weekly activity: Mind mapping

Session 2: How to be a creative sponge

• In-class activities: Originality and playfulness
• Practical & unorthodox research strategies
• Look at examples of artistic & curatorial processes
• Filter and archive all that is gathered
• Look at types of visual logs
• Weekly activity: Collect collect collect!

Session 3: Finding the needle in the haystack & organizing the chaos

• In-class activity: Make new connections
• How to identify & develop your own individual practice
• In-class activities: Find hidden threads
• Examples of artistic & curatorial processes
• Weekly activity: Continue visual logs: Experiment

Session 4: How can this be better?

• In-class activities: Project structure
• Critique strategies
• Critical thinking & analysis strategies
• Taking risks with idea development
• In-class activity: Think big!
• In-class activity: Obstructions
• Examples of artistic & curatorial processes
• Weekly activity: Bringing big down to earth

Session 5: Putting the pieces together

• Assess initial results
• Group discussion: Bringing big down to earth
• In-class activity: Pick one idea to further develop
• Choose what to leave out
• Prototype
• Know when to keep looping back through the process
• Examples of how to refine a project
• In-class activity: Presentation
• Examples of post-production analysis
• Cultivate a creative attitude & atmosphere
• How to apply these strategies to a number of different tasks
• In-class activity: Think big – revisited
• In-class activity: Analysis of visual logs
• Group critique of individual work
• Final Q & A