30-10-2020
Ever thought how to pull out ideas from thoughts? Yes, you are right, using a thinking tool. One more from the never-ending list to choose from. This one is known as “Affinity Mapping” and is a convergent thinking tool. It is helpful in pulling out new ideas from the existing set of concerns. I would call it as relooking on what is already there either collaboratively or individually. This session happened on a theme of “Authentic”. This tool has three steps that needs to be followed:
Step 1: Writing down all the questions, problems, and concepts around the subject chosen (here “Authentic”). (Not more than one line sentence or phrase)
Step 2: Grouping these concepts wherever there is affinity between them. Thus, creating clusters of the same.
Step 3: Taking a look at these clusters and asking, “What is it implying?” Giving a title to it (3-4 words phrase). This provides us the position in an area in which we are thinking and helps in pulling out interesting ideas or values.
Apart from this thinking tool, this week we explored making stories from happy accidents and trust me it’s a very easy and fun thing. It started with choosing any one accident and then creating a few more around it to complete the story. We can either take a character or landscapes or some colors to make a connection. I chose my “I & Farmer” accident to start with and the story generates as follows:
My experiences of this process suggests that stories already exists in our intuition, it’s just we need to bring it out. After this the discussion followed with looking at some art pieces by artist Paul Klee & Henry Matisee, I have discussed it in my Prakirnha section of the blog. This discussion opened my eyes on my lack of vocabulary or language for visual reading. It is like that our dominant knowledge systems of reading and writing has taken away our capacity of visual reading of art forms. This language has to be developed to appreciate and give justice to any artwork. But how to construct this language? The answer is looking at more and more art and making art as a practice. Also reading what different people have written about artworks and artists can also help. Becoming more observant is the only key.
Crafted Blueprints 