Coming up with creative solutions and brainstorming new ideas can be daunting when starting from scratch. This week we were exposed to a variety of creative thinking techniques that can aid this process. These include brainstorming, mind maps, round robin, opposite thinking, collage/ cut-up, mash-up, crazy eights and SCAMPER.
This week's brief centred around choosing an existing artefact and remediating it into another form of the artefact. The artefact could be a short story, illustration, poem, song etc.
Once I had read the brief I realised that I was jumping to thinking about final outcomes - imagining modified and edited illustrations and so on. However, I was missing the point of the activity completely. The focus of the activity was intended to be in the process, the use of various techniques we studied this week to help us foster creativity and generate new ideas. In order to do the activity I really had to step out of my comfort zone and enjoy the journey without thinking about the destination, allowing the output to happen organically.
At first I immediately assumed I should stay away from choosing a song to remediate into another form because I am not someone who can read music or play an instrument. I thought that was out of the realm of my capability.
As I was searching around for illustrations that might catch my eye to use for this activity, one of my current favourite songs began playing in my headphones. It was 'What Once Was' by Her's. I couldn't help but feel myself gravitate towards choosing this as my artefact and pay some sort of homage to this band that I listen to so regularly.
I decided to scrap the doubts that were holding me back and dove straight into ideation techniques. Whenever I listen to this song I feel like I'm being transported into a moment of bliss, particularly when I listen to the intro (my favourite part of the song). I quickly began to mind map the feelings and moods that the song conjures up for me. The exercise proved extremely effective in giving me a systematic way to express, visualise and organise the connotations and ideas that I have associated with this song.
From here I wanted to challenge my assumptions that I needed to be musical in order to be able to remediate a song. So I chose to use the opposite thinking problem-solving technique (Board of Innovation, 2020) and wrote down the core assumptions that were blocking my creative process. I then challenged myself to verbalise opposite realities for each of them. This was an eye-opening exercise that really helped me break through my previous limiting mindset. From the solutions that I generated in this exercise I began to play around with visual ways of representing the song.
After this ideation exercise, I decided to try out the 'incubation' phase of the ICEPID iterative method (Petty, 2017), to let things lie a little bit whilst directing my attention elsewhere. In this time, and for no particular reason, I decided to watch a beginner’s guitar tutorial about how to play the intro to ‘What Once Was’. I noticed that the same notes were being looped during the intro. I drew up a diagram of a guitar neck with only the first 8 frets and jotted down the finger position for each note that the teacher played, highlighting which string was being strummed. I then connected up the finger position for each note with the next one using a curved line. From this point I wondered what would happen if I vectorised the line in Illustrator.
Once I had traced the line shape in Illustrator I copied it into After Effects and made it loop continuously. I timed the animation so that it fit better with the pace of the song. Finally I exported it as a looping gif. The final result of this week's remediation activity can be seen below:
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The feedback received from my peers for this assignment was insightful and rewarding. The comments have definitely encouraged me to share more of my process for the challenge activities moving forward.
Lauran commented that "the use of colors, the speed of the frame, and the way the line undulates captures the mood of the song. It's very relaxing. Also, thanks for showing the guitar frets, too! That really helps me better understand and appreciate the thought and effort that went into your project! Good job!"
I'm excited about the doors that these ideation techniques we studied this week can open in my creative endeavours. I probably wouldn't have thought to turn the sounds of a song into an aesthetically pleasing motion graphic without experimenting with the opposite thinking exercise. Bring on more design challenges and problems to solve!
Board of Innovation. (2020). Opposite Thinking - Board Of Innovation. [online] Available at: https://www.boardofinnovation.com/tools/opposite-thinking/ [Accessed 26 September 2021].
Geoff, P. (2017). How to be Better at Creativity.
Grusin, R. and Bolter, J. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media.
