Thinking-Reading-Making 1

16-10-2020

It is especially important for me to write this down and to share my experiences of thinking-reading-making. I am a thinker but one that does not know how to streamline my thoughts. But now this has to change as I will be exploring various tools to have conversations with my thoughts, to express my thoughts, the tools for thinking. The idea is of practising, probing & prodding with these tools developing a thinking routine. Thinking routine that is creative, discerning, purposeful, and playful, the designerly ways of thinking and knowing. It started with associative thinking tool, as one of my fellow batch mates expressed it as “Putting 2 & 2 together”. This tool helps to generate a vocabulary and is named “Flower Map”. Something very similar to mind maps, but this is never ending and doesn’t lead us anywhere. That is the reason I guess it lies at lowermost level of thinking.

Soon after warming up for a while with the flower map we moved to a convergent thinking tool, known as sphere of concerns and influence. Sphere of concerns is a sphere where one can put down all the concern that one has in a very specific manner, the next step is to pull all the concerns that I have control upon into the sphere of influence and I have to worry about that concerns only as others outside, anyway is not at all in my hand. It allows me to negotiate with my dilemmas and thus allows me to perform an action. It also provides me the clearer picture of concerns to focus upon.

I am a reader and I do read academic papers. But it takes a lot of time for one to understand the claim and central idea that the author is talking about, especially when the vocabulary is difficult. This issue gets much easier when we read collectively. Exploring that, I with my peers & instructors did a cognitive reading using the tool of Claim:Support:Questions. This tool helps to understand the claim or the hypothesis that the author is making. Abstracting the theme and delayering the core of the research. It allows us to look at the evidences he/she is providing to support that claim or theme and finally leads us to questions on what the author is missing or not telling.

Using this tool Me, Sakshita & Bhavitraa analysed and understood the crux of an academic paper by Louise Sundararajan & Maharaj K Raina called “Revolutionary Creativity, East and West: A Critique from Indigenous Psychology”. Here authors talks about how cross-cultural psychology has preconceived definitions of what is to be considered has revolutionary creativity and it doesn’t include the evolutionary creativity that lies in the eastern culture, so what he claims in the paper as a larger framework is a need to look at both revolutionary and evolutionary creativity from a lens of indigenous psychology, to understand that actually both of them are interconnected and confronts upon each other. It actually helps to question the way we are colonized and look to western models of creativity to interpret ourselves. And how it can impact our notion of self, art and design education, creative industries as well as the way we choose to shape the world in many ways. Despite having different world-views and fundamental differences between cultural standpoints, the dominant knowledge system and colonial after-effects dictates our perception about ourselves. So it raises a question that can we begin by looking closely to reassess and rediscover what we want to define as creativity or authenticity and how do we want to shape new futures based on that.

The next thing that was explored with Srivi is making. Making illustrations. It started with looking closely at the works of my favourite illustrators. What do I see? Why do I like it? What is the style, techniques, emotional representations, narrative approaches and art and design elements used by the illustrator in the illustration? Two of the tools for illustrating where explored, one was about observing the line/axis in artists illustrations, abstracting that lines, using it to create my own illustration keeping alive the spirit of that lines and the second was to create happy accidents. All of these tools in a way are helping to create my own language of thinking-reading-making in the studio. Generating my own set of tools for applying it to my practice.