Jumpstarting Spring Semester Creativity
After a four week hiatus, we are back in the studio again! My break was filled with family time, skiing, puzzles, and my mom’s delicious cooking, and I had quite settled in to a routine by mid January. But I’m happy to be back in class again, and ready to buckle down with five new classes.
We jumpstarted this first week back with our newly instituted RE: Lab time, which this week consisted of a creativity workshop run by two women from Google. While the lab this semester adds extra class time, I think many of us were excited to have a designated time each week where our whole program comes together. Last semester there were several people that I barely ever saw!
While I am a sucker for fun workshops in general, I thought this one was especially fun, and totally did the trick of reminding me how important it is to iterate and expand your thinking even when you already think that you have the best idea ever.
In our groups of three, each person was given a prompt to serve as a restriction in our brainstorming process. After initially doodling ideas alone, we then had to create an imaginary scenario that combined all three of our restrictions. Our restrictions were:
- We’re in outer space
- There’s frequent lightning
- Everyone has to breathe from a snorkel
The proceeding brainstorming was hilarious, and though we loved our first concept, when pushed to keep thinking of new ideas, we kept coming up with weirder and weirder ones. As seen below…
First scenario: On a far-off, ocean covered planet, humans have set up an underwater settlement. Because lightning is striking the water frequently, the water is very electrically charged, so the humans have to wear underwater lightning proof suits when going between the buildings of the underwater settlement. They move around connected by their snorkel to a grid system that channels the electricity to a power source while protecting the people.
Second scenario: On another planet, humans have tried to set up a settlement even though the planet is filled with electrically charged gases which explode out of holes in the surface. The snorkel filters the gases in the air while towers collect the electricity and all sorts of electric animals congregate around the belching holes.
Third scenario: A race of long-necked pink aliens have adapted to their lightning filled planet by gaining energy and strength from the lightning. The each wear a snorkel like attachment in order to be even taller to attract and channel the lightning. The more upstanding you are, the taller your snorkel. If you do something bad, your snorkel gets cut down.
Fun times with Google on Tuesday! I am exciting to use some of these brainstorming methods to help us push our RE project forward.
In other news, I made this dancing crab gif in UX class this week. Seems like a good way to sign off.
