Can creativity be 'taught'? Or is it simply innate?
This book will help you find your creativity through your own unique identity and experience, challenging you to fight those negative voices, get out of your habitual comfort zones and – most importantly – play.
Part practical workshop and part provocative guide, Creativity Begins With You is an invaluable companion for any student working across the creative disciplines.
Another book on creative process – really?
Over the past thirty years – through our own experiences studying, designing and teaching, we have always gravitated towards the questions of ‘why’ rather than ‘what’, the ‘how’ rather than the ‘who’, and enjoyed dismantling objects & ideas as much as we have delighted in creating them. There was something resonating under the surface of the work we produced or admired that seemed to be progressively more interesting than much of the formal design output celebrated online, in trade magazines or in glossy award annuals. It has been no real surprise to see that encouraging creativity in others has become a significant part of our own work.
Over the past decade, this interest developed into a more overt pursuit of understanding the place of ‘creativity’ & ‘process’ in our teaching, which led to a series of workshops that began to frame a student’s own working methodology as the main event – rather than their process being a means-to-an-end. What if the way you worked as a designer, or writer, or architect became the object of self-study – exploring something deeper than the pursuit of developing the logo, or story, or building? What would you notice? What would surprise you? What would shock you? What would you want to change? What would you protect?
So, this book began as a series of informal ‘learning’ experiments with students that pooled our collective observations-to-date, inviting them to reflect on their practice and propose alternative versions of their future selves. Over time, the experiments grew, and developed into a body of work that seemed to have a centre-of-gravity – a constellation of creative possibilities that framed the heart of an individual’s practice, equipping them with an ever-expanding pool of material to refer to whenever they felt stuck, uninspired or crippled with self-doubt (which comes with the territory).
The material herein is part-practical-workshop, part-provocative-guide, part-theoretical-conversation, and is based on our experiences and observations from those early experiments with students. In the same way that there are never enough songs (or novels, or typefaces, or paintings…) in this world because it is the wider creative process behind them that creates their inherent value, this book seeks to add to the conversation around creativity in a way that places you at in middle of the picture and works outwards.
Over the past decade, this interest developed into a more overt pursuit of understanding the place of ‘creativity’ & ‘process’ in our teaching, which led to a series of workshops that began to frame a student’s own working methodology as the main event – rather than their process being a means-to-an-end. What if the way you worked as a designer, or writer, or architect became the object of self-study – exploring something deeper than the pursuit of developing the logo, or story, or building? What would you notice? What would surprise you? What would shock you? What would you want to change? What would you protect?
So, this book began as a series of informal ‘learning’ experiments with students that pooled our collective observations-to-date, inviting them to reflect on their practice and propose alternative versions of their future selves. Over time, the experiments grew, and developed into a body of work that seemed to have a centre-of-gravity – a constellation of creative possibilities that framed the heart of an individual’s practice, equipping them with an ever-expanding pool of material to refer to whenever they felt stuck, uninspired or crippled with self-doubt (which comes with the territory).
The material herein is part-practical-workshop, part-provocative-guide, part-theoretical-conversation, and is based on our experiences and observations from those early experiments with students. In the same way that there are never enough songs (or novels, or typefaces, or paintings…) in this world because it is the wider creative process behind them that creates their inherent value, this book seeks to add to the conversation around creativity in a way that places you at in middle of the picture and works outwards.