This week is all about fostering creativity by exploring different creative techniques, for this challenge we must select one or more ideation techniques discussed this week and apply them to the following challenge:
1. Choose an existing artefact that is the output of someone’s creativity. This could be a poem, short story, illustration, song or anything else you think is interesting.
2. Modify the artefact in some way using the techniques you selected. The aim is to remediate it into another form of the artefact.
When I first looked at the brief for this challenge, I was both excited creative exercise and terrified by sheer choice of ideas that quickly sprang into my head! So, to get my mind settled, I decided to begin looking at the suggested reading list for this week and see where that took me.
First on the list was an old BBC video on how David Bowie used ‘cut ups’ to create lyrics, this brought back memories of my art studies many years ago when we were shown this technique.
I really liked the idea of this technique, as it allows you to create something coherent from randomness, I feel that you could come up with a really compelling game concept this way and this is something I will try with my students in our next game design project. One issue with this technique could be the creation of something totally abstract that wont work, so it might be sensible to make multiple cut up selection attempts and select the best combinations or perhaps combine the selection attempts together to make something more workable.
Next, I looked through the brainstorming article from mindtools.com as this is a technique, I regularly use with my level 1 students to help them generate ideas for their group projects.
I’ve found that group brainstorming really helps them focus on the task and allows everyone to be involved creatively and speak freely, providing it’s managed well. Whereas, I’ve found that with individual brainstorming they seem to struggle to generate as many ideas and become overwhelmed.
After looking through these techniques and thinking about the brief some more, I came up with a mind map to choose the artefact that I would modify:
I find mind mapping really useful way jotting my ideas down and organising them into a more logical format. The above mind map helped me to list a variety of media and potential creative ways of modifying them and to make my choice based on what I thought I could achieve in the timescale.
In the end, I chose to remediate a film poster for the film Alien:
You can see the results in part 2..
References: · BBC News (2016) How David Bowie used 'cut ups' to create lyrics - BBC News [online video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nlW4EbxTD8
· Brainstorming: Generating Many Radical, Creative Ideas (2020). Available at: https://www.mindtools.com/brainstm.html Mindmapping.com. (2019). Mind Mapping - How to Mind Map. [online] Available at: https://www.mindmapping.com/.
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