Creative Thinking: Strategies to Develop and Refine your Project Ideas

Duration

Jan. 28 - Feb. 25, 2020

Enroll before

Jan. 24, 2020

One-time Payment

154.00 € (incl. VAT)

Live sessions

3 hrs/week

Every project we want to make or do starts with an idea, an impulse that is often inspired by a subject or question we are interested in exploring. But how can we make that initial idea the best it can be? This course will expose participants to a number of different strategies for research, development, and refinement of an idea while creating visual tools to track their ideation process.

This 5 week course is for curators, artists, designers, and anyone in the cultural fields wishing to make the creative process of developing concepts more effective and to arrive at ideas that would take their projects to the next level. The course’s expanded length of time will allow for participants to get deeper into their creative thinking process.

Following the course, participants will learn a range of creative thinking and research techniques, including practical and unorthodox research methods as well as visual tools to track their creative process. Participants will be able to apply these techniques to any number of project ideas, leading to the creation of each participant’s unique method that is suited to their specific practice and the needs of the project.

*Prices include VAT

Session 1: The basics of creative thinking

Introductions
In-class activities: Steps of creative problem solving

Define your goal / problem sensitivity 
Idea brainstorming techniques 
Mind mapping & other train of consciousness techniques  
Perseverance

How/where to gather & keep this information
A brief introduction into the theory of creative thinking

A theory of thinking modes 
A theory of problem types 
Why and how design thinking works

Learning from artists: One thing leads to another
Weekly activity: Mind mapping

Session 2: How to be a creative sponge

In-class activities: Originality and playfulness
Practical & unorthodox research strategies
Look at examples of artistic & curatorial processes
Filter and archive all that is gathered
Look at types of visual logs
Weekly activity: Collect collect collect!

Session 3: Finding the needle in the haystack & organizing the chaos

In-class activity: Make new connections
How to identify & develop your own individual practice
In-class activities: Find hidden threads
Examples of artistic & curatorial processes
Weekly activity: Continue visual logs: Experiment

Session 4: How can this be better?

In-class activities: Project structure
Critique strategies
Critical thinking & analysis strategies
Taking risks with idea development
In-class activity: Think big!
In-class activity: Obstructions
Examples of artistic & curatorial processes
Weekly activity: Bringing big down to earth

Session 5: Putting the pieces together

Assess initial results
Group discussion: Bringing big down to earth
In-class activity: Pick one idea to further develop
Choose what to leave out
Prototype
Know when to keep looping back through the process
Examples of how to refine a project
In-class activity: Presentation
Examples of post-production analysis
Cultivate a creative attitude & atmosphere
How to apply these strategies to a number of different tasks
In-class activity: Think big - revisited
In-class activity: Analysis of visual logs
Group critique of individual work
Final Q & A

System requirements for the live video conferences: Mac OS x 10.11 or higher or Windows 7 or higher.

Creative Thinking: Strategies to Develop and Refine your Project Ideas

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