WEEK 2 (9/7-9/14)
View my 50 Shades assignment
Class Reflection
This week we did a group project to practice researching as designers. I liked working as a group on a small project like this because everyone brought their own experiences and knowledge to the table, to collaborate and further our research.
Lecture 2, Sketching and Ideating
The lecturer quotes architect Louis Khan on materiality- "... Honor the material that you use... Honor the brick and glorify the brick." To honor material is to understand it, properly utilize it and see how far it can be pushed. The craft of material plays an important role for a designer, to think of their work in an applied way and not just as concept. It reminds me of a phrase I would always hear in art "a painter's painter". To me, the meaning of this phrase was to express a great sense of admiration, mostly relating to their use of material. A painter who uses the material with a skill that maybe only other painters could fully appreciate and understand.
Sunny Brown, The Miseducation of the Doodle
This was a fun, light article that seemed to attempt to intellectualize the "doodle" and reframe it as a device to help us focus or process information. I'm not much of a doodler, even though I am a visual learner. I just like to write things out, read them and organize them into lists, charts, etc., it doesn't necessarily have to be image based. I would imagine that a lot of my classmates are doodlers- it seems to be a symptom of focus, or a compulsion of creative people. Do you doodle?
Mike Rohde, Sketching: The Visual Thinking Power Tool
"Ugly gets the job done just fine."
Because I came to design from a fine arts background, sketching is intuitive and common sense to me. I've done this when building my own low fidelity wire frames, and other parts of the UX design process. It just makes sense. The resources and ways of thinking this article suggests are really great and practical, and I'll be saving them for future reference.
Twyla Tharpe, I Walk Into A White Room (Chapter 1), from The Creative Habit
The chapter has two ideas on the scale- artistic talent and creativity arbitrarily gracing artists by the gift of god, and art manifesting through hard work and discipline. The author argues for the latter, and cites Mozart's reputation, and claims in reality he was much harder working and had a musical pedigree. I'll connect this week's reading to last week's, "The Creative Act" by Rick Rubin, where he describes creativity almost like a butterfly that will fly to the next person if you don't catch it and act on it. My beliefs lie somewhere in between the two ideas.
There's this song I love called "The Shape of My Heart", and the musician, Sting, described what he was trying to express in an interview: "The card player in my song is more interested in the mystical aspect of luck rather than just winning money. It’s his meditation, his spirituality. Winning is not important, playing the game is. …It’s me playing a game with my career: It’s not about having hit records or Grammy nominations or making lots of money at all. It’s really about playing the creative game. It’s play – but it’s serious play." I don't have any hit records, but this is exactly how I feel about my practice. I'm playing the game I feel called to play, and it's not about winning, it's just about being in it. I'm ascetic, but calling it "hard work" feels completely blasphemous.
All summer, I was fortunate to be in the position where I had to make as many paintings as possible. I worked on them every day, and pushed other plans and opportunities to the side, because I knew I would regret it if I didn't give the project all of my energy and completely dedicate myself. People around me thought I must be exhausted, and it was exhausting, and I had to be disciplined and say no to things, but I couldn't imagine a more privileged position, where I got to fully focus on my artistic pursuits and rely on my natural talents. I'm so deliriously happy and grateful to be in this program where I can do more of that, educate myself further and continue to do so in the future.
Insisting on the "hard work" of creative practice feels so out of touch to me. I've done actual hard work. I've cleaned bathrooms, and bodily fluids, and had bosses and customers take their anger out on me. People do hard work day in and day out, in thankless jobs. I am disciplined, but how could I go on about how hard I work when now I'm in a position where I get to create things I love, often on my own terms? And when so many people work in unrewarded jobs we fully depend on as a society? It feels like the author is trying to convince themself that if art is hard, it is more noble or should be more worthy of respect. She calls a blank canvas "terrifying".
