Creative Tools: a handbook of 15 methods for design practice

"Creative Tools was co-authored by Alex Fung, Alice Lo and Mamata N. Rao based on their teaching and students' learning experiences in the Design Thinking subject. Foreword by Dr. Edward de Bono, this handbook is a comprehensive guide to 15 creative tools that help develop students' creative thinking, not only for design by other disciplines. Each tool has an introduction followed by a demonstration of its use with reflection."

(香港理工大學/Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Alex Fung, Alice Lo, Mamata N. Rao (2005). "Creative Tools", School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

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Communicating and discovering insight through reflective journals

A reflective journal is both a communication tool and a design method for developing professional practice. Such journals allow designers to publish their projects as they progress and provide a platform for critically reflecting on creative works and the design process.

Reflective journals can be used to discover insight about how designers approach their creative problem-solving. This is commonly understood as a central requirement for designers to develop their professionalism and to become experts in the field. They do so through reflecting on their work - characterising common features and critically analysing successes and failures.

Reflective journals also help designers situate their work within the broader creative industries and contemporary visual culture context. Designers might use their journal to document developing trends and to collect examples of inspirational works. These collections might be made as part of the research phase of a given project or contribute to a more general understanding of a design field.

Such journals should take an appropriate form so that they communicate effectively and provide necessary insight. They might exist in a singular form e.g. a workbook, a weblog or they might exist as a collection e.g. as a workbook of sketches with notes/annotations and as a weblog/Tumblr of photographs/videos with associated critical reflections.

The following are examples of art and design reflective journals:

• Sketchbook blog of illustrator and cartoonist Jillian Tamaki: http://blog.jilliantamaki.com/


• Design blog of visual artist/illustrator Bryce Wymer: http://brycewymer.blogspot.co.uk/


• Webblog of Nottingham Trent University first year Multimedia student Zoe Stroud: http://zoestroud90.blogspot.co.uk/


• Weblog by Havering Sixth Form College student Victoria Robinson: http://vickierobinsongraphics.tumblr.com/


• Blog by Spainish graphic design student Lydia Franco: http://www.lylena.blogspot.co.uk/


• Mary Whittingham's student photography blog: http://marywhittingham.blogspot.co.uk/


• Group visual culture blog: http://wewastetime.wordpress.com/


• Architecture blog created by Orsalia Dimitriou and Dejan Mrdja: http://studiosynthetica.wordpress.com/


• Blog by Goldsmiths, University of London digital media student Justin Pickard: http://justinpickard.net/blog/

William Forsythe: choreography as a reflection of social spheres

"In his installation performances such as Human Writes or Heterotopia, to which Forsythe has dedicated an increasing amount of his time in recent years, choreography becomes a social practice. Forsythe's installations are controlled test arrangements in which all the participants can observe themselves, their bodies and their movements together. When a performance like Human Writes deals in substance with the difficulties surrounding universal human rights, it becomes clear where the potential of dance and movement can lie. After all, it's not abstract universal laws alone that guarantee our co-existence. It is much more our physical actions, our daily movements that create and shape the community. Herein lies the political meaning of Forsythe's notion of dance. He creates spaces where he places people in a new, unknown relationship to themselves so that they reflect differently on their (social) spheres and in so doing explore their own potential scope for action."

(Gerald Siegmund, May 2008, Goethe-Institut)

Fig.3 Dominik Mentzos, "Human Writes", performance-Installation by William Forsythe and Kendall Thomas [http://www.theforsythecompany.com/pressphotos/humanwrites/].

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Towards a critical discourse of practice as research

"A problem confronting many artistic researchers is related to the need for the artist to write about his or her own work in the research report or exegesis, The outcomes of such research are not easily quantifiable and it can be difficult to articulate objectively, methods processes, and conclusions that emerge from an alternative logic of practice and the intrinsically subjective dimension of artistic production. Moreover, conventional approaches and models of writing about art generally fall within the domain of criticism, a discourse that tends to focus on connoisieurial evaluation of the finished product. How then, might the artist as researcher avoid on one hand, what has been referred to as 'auto-connoisseurship', the undertaking of a thinly veiled labour of valorising what has been achieved in the creative work, or alternatively producing a research report that is mere description (Nelson 2004)?

In this paper, I suggest that a way of overcoming such a dilemma is for creative arts researchers to shift the critical focus away from the notion of the work as product, to an understanding of both studio enquiry and its outcomes as process. I will draw on Michel Foucault's essay 'What is An Author ' (Rabinow, 1991) to explore how we might move away from art criticism to the notion of a critical discourse of practice-led enquiry that involves viewing the artist as a researcher, and the artist/critic as a scholar who examines the value of artistic process as the production of knowledge. As I will demonstrate, in adopting such an approach, practitioner researchers need not ignore or negate the specificities and particularities of practice - including its subjective and emergent methodologies which I have argued elsewhere, constitute the generative strength that distinguishes artistic research from more traditional approaches Barrett, 2005). In elaborating the relationship between a these aspects and the more distanced focus made available through Foucault's elaboration of author function, I will draw on Donna Haraway's (1991, 1992) notion of 'situated knowledge' and her critique of social constructivism which reveals how the scientific method is implicated in social constructivist accounts of knowledge. It is this alignment, suggests Haraway,that results in the effacement of particularities of experience from which situated knowledges emerge. In order to ground and illustrate the arguments and ideas presented in this paper, I will also refer to Pablo Picasso's, Demioselles d''Avignon and a selection of critical commentaries on this work by Leo Steinberg (1988), William Rubin (1994) and Lisa Florman (2003)."

(Estelle Barrett, 2006)

Barrett, E. (2006) Materializing pedagogies. Working Papers in Art and Design 4 Retrieved from URL http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/papers/wpades/vol4/ebfull.html ISSN 1466-4917

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How and When Prototyping Practices Affect Design Performance

"How does the structure of prototyping practice affect learning, motivation, and performance? In this talk, I will describe research on iteration and comparison, two key principles for discovering contextual design variables and their interrelationships. We found that, even under tight time constraints when the common intuition is to stop iterating and start refining, iterative prototyping helps designers learn. Our results also demonstrate that creating and receiving feedback on multiple prototypes in parallel - as opposed to serially - leads to more divergent concepts, more explicit comparison, less investment in a single concept, and better overall design performance. This talk highlights relevant research in cognitive and social psychology and shares the results of our preliminary design studies."

(Steven Dow, 19 November 2009, Google Tech Talk)

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