Creativity

https://youtu.be/CgCdsERkqrc
https://youtu.be/RjwUn-aA0VY

After reading a research article on Embodied Metaphors and Creative "Acts" and watching videos from Youtube I have realised that involving play in my work will benefit my whole approach to creating work. The videos I watched discuss the various elements of creativity as shown above to how to stop self editing and restricting myself. Children are far better at this as they are not so fearful of being wrong. Taking this attitude and allowing more playful working methods may produce results that might be slightly less inhibited. This is something I learned last year through Creative Research when I essentially created a game that let me build stories which I would have never have thought of or imagined on my own without the help of the game.
The research article was found through Summon and consists of a series of studies carried out by a group of academics specialising within the field of psychological science. They investigated through five different studies the effects of taking metaphors and testing them in the real world to see the effects on creativity. The studio 2a and 2b were most interesting to me, playing on the metaphor "think outside the box". 2a involved the participants creativity being tested using an actual box. They investigated whether convergent and divergent thinking were affected by whether someone was placed inside or outside a box and set a task. 2b involved walking either to a set path laid in tape consisting of a rectangular box shape or being able to walk freely whilst thinking on a set task. In the case of 2a the participant who were outside the box were most successful whilst 2b resulted in the participants who were allowed to walk freely being able to generate more ideas.
These studies actually make a great deal of sense to me when thinking about my own working processes. I find that I very rarely try to think about idea generation when working within my small study at home. This area is for researching, blogging and creating art whether traditional or digital. The art can lead itself at sometimes I am not exactly sure what it is I'm about to draw. However thinking about ideas is not generally done here. Instead I tend to find that my best ideas come whilst I am working in either of my part-time jobs. These jobs don't require much thought as they are essentially manual labour. This seems to free my mind and I find that issues I may have been contemplating at home can often solve themselves whilst I am working. Again going to open spaces or travelling on trains can often lead to my mind taking paths unknown beforehand. These methods may become useful with this project, as I am possibly looking at metaphors I have also realised that a play on words may be useful. For example the word Empire, I may tie in Big, Power, Ruthless and so on to see what may come out of those words. I can keep doing this until images appear from my imagination as the words could be tied back to the initial starter point of Empire through creating visuals that demonstrate the key word metaphorically. Sections of this research article are shown below with particular reference to studies 2a and 2b.