A bit less thinking and a bit more doing!

Reflections after New Year Break:

From the Welcome back Jan 15 post on mace blog, Corrine has written

It (creativity) was all about breaking away from default, observing and pulling two seemingly unconnected ideas together. That is a big part of creativity… culture will change the default from one person to another

I want to emphasis the point how culture will change our default image of an objects. Weighting from my childhood, my default image of ‘bread’ is Chinese hot dog bun.

Therefore I really understand how culture can influences us in different way. If we are working in a team for a creative project, this could be a very brilliant thing. We can have a diverge range of ideas in a very short time. However, if communication failed within the team, it can still be very difficult for a creative project to work.

The one good idea will not get accepted and develop since the person who present or receive the idea do not understand each other clearly. So with culture, it can be a good influence or bad influence too.

Also, from the design thinking checklist, I realised with my team Creativcontrol, I found my own innovation blocking behaviors and I hope that I can eliminate them in order to improve our overall performances as a team.

> not iterative (project dies because unwilling to build on weaknesses)

My of my weaknesses is I am very easy to give up on unrealistic idea, despite I have realised this problem and trying to improve. Ideas which involve with very high budget or very difficult manufacturing process, my passion will drop and step out from the team. This behavior is so weak that it reflects my pessimistic thinking and unwillingness.

Ways to improve is to be more risk taking!

Instead of banning an idea immediately, allow ideas to come in from different perspectives. Instead of banning some of the idea which seem unrealistic at a time, give room to develop and if logically I really disagree, back up by research and evidence, then explain to the team why the idea is not working. If there is no research to back up the fault of the idea, it means that I shoud give it a go!

>valuing personal intuition over experimentation

I have to admit before the push from MACE class, even coming out from an Art Uni. I do not like prototype and experimentation. Once again it because of my lack of confidence in some risky ideas and unwillingness. I only put effort into things that I can guarantee myself a success. IT IS SUCH A BAD HABIT.

Ways to improve this is I believe is encouragement. Lots and lots of encouragements and the influences from MACE has helped me a lot  and so it makes the title of this post one of the aims for this year

A bit less thinking and a bit more doing

Filed under: Design thinking

Web design Class 1 & 2

So the Mace class is split in two groups for our web design class, according to our level of knowledge in building a web, advance or basic.

I have done my entire website in Dreamweaver and also tried some flash but not anything on top of that. So we have been focusing the format of site, how to design the primary and secondary page. We also got introduced that by paying or putting some extra add-ons, it’s very simple to personalise the format and build a site with the help of wordpress. Also if we happened to know a bit an action scripts, we can also change a lot of the details.

Also, we got introduced to Google Adwords, or some free tools (SEO) we can found the best way to promote our sites. More amazingly,  with Google stat, we can found out in what way does people get to know our sites, what is the highest search words. How long does people has to wait till one page is loaded, how long do they stayed at your sites in average. So by knowing this info, I can track down very easily what I should do more in order to improve the popularity or your site, or other targets.

I am not 100% knowing that I can manage that but still its a good place to start!

The 2nd class we focused more towards how to handle our clients as a freelancer.This class is useful for people like us with limited experiences. I think i want to mentioned is its important that we identify and FIRED the BAD clients. At this beginning stage of being a freelancer, I am over drown with take a lot of jobs to build up portfolio/ experiences. Sometimes I come with a bad client, I would still suck with the unfairness and thought this is a must-take for new graduates until we can process to the next stage, APPARENTLY NOT!

It’s no good to keep any of them and I will not learn anything from them, they will only brings in more bad contacts and poor clients. I guess it still hard to say no to a job when I come to opportunities but after this class I have a deep thought about it and knowing how I can drop this like a bad habit and attracted to the GOOD client.

Filed under: Class Reflection

Pier’s Class I

First of all, I want to say this is an excellent class!! I will always remember what I have experienced today. We talked a lot about creative leadership and have some very inspiring activities together. There are  a few points I want to share here.

The raw materials of Creative Leadership
- ‘Constraints.’ i.e. Time constraints,  environment constraints and a open-mind to allow the birth of a good idea.
- ‘Principles.’ Creativity needs good principles but not limitations in terms of the working styles and format.

Three fears of a Creative Individuals
- fears of being wrong, being rude, seemingly mad.

Piers also explained what is an artist’s mind in his views, his belief is that ‘nothing is come from nothing’, everything must have a cause or a reason.  if you come across difficulties and got stuck with a creative process. It’s not too much to worry about, ‘metamorphosis  is unstoppable”, if you go nothing, it will still change!

This is so similar to my final year project for my undergraduate degree, I design a book and try to express a statement “allow unresolved“, it is an abstract psychological approach. It was about a year ago that I produced that, I still have a very high acceptance of this method of thinking, however I could have explained it further with the support of Pier’s idea. Also, where I was reading the articles written by Piers, the way how he express abstract idea taught me a lot and I could have express my idea in a better way. I am glad that I have a chance to have a class with him, it really do means a lot to me as we are similar kind of artists mentally!

Filed under: Design thinking, Leadership