Tuesday 24 February 2009

Journal Task: Research

In the past few years the purpose of my creativity has been to build on what I can do and explore different areas of deigns as well as determining the technical level of my creativity and discovering what drives and influences my ideas. It’s constantly building and will always be so that I can get to a higher level of creativity.

It has been for myself, but also for my peers and educators. Myself because I need to be able to be creative to a minimum level, which I feel I am, but I need to understand what needs to be done to be at that level in terms of technique and method. My peers because they can look at what I have created and give me feedback and suggestions. My educators because they have made the decisions to let me progress as far as I already have, and there will always be someone to decide whether my creativity is at a good enough level, after educators there will be businesses and people from the real world.

When I have created work in the past I put it through stages of selection, which involve all of the groups that I say my creativity has been for. First of all I select various versions of a final piece, all of which are in the later stages of design. Then I pass them onto peers and educators for feedback, obviously I get a variety because of the difference between peers and educators so I have to determine which of the feedback I’m likely to incorporate into the final version. It’s likely that I use feedback in most of my final versions, but I will not use it to an extent that it would effectively change a design, so I would say that when creating my work the decisions I make are my own, but in some circumstances they are influenced by groups, but they have to be - if a product were created without first prototyping it, its likely to have flaws which the audience do not want.

What do I want the future of my creativity to be? I suppose I want it to be something that’s very broad and constantly growing, and of course I want it to have the involvement of various groups because this helps to broaden ideas and technique.

Research can help me get to the point I want to be at because I feel it is the basis of any idea, and therefore of my own creativity. For example, before I starting drawing sketches for my logo’s, I first looked at existing ones, but specifically I looked at tribal designs, I.e. tattoo’s because I knew that one of my designs was going to have a tribal theme to it.

When first starting research I like to use the exploratory method because it’s the best way to look at a lot of information and compile it without actually knowing specifically what to look at. However, it’s not my favourite, I find Interim to be the most useful. Once I know what I’m specifically looking for I use a web-based application called StumbleUpon. It’s an application which allows it’s users to ‘stumble upon’ new things which they have specified a category for and save the pages to come back to after gathering enough - I.e. if you select a category such as Arts, then there are subcategories such as drawings, which I have used to look at character sketches to try and initiate ideas for my avatar.

I do not really feel very weary of any of the methods, nor do I find any of them irrelevant, I feel they all play their part, there’s a point in a project in which each of the research methods could be used.

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