Week 2
This process is based on James Webb Young’s "Technique for Producing Ideas.”
I chose James Webb Young’s “Technique for Producing Ideas” to generate my idea. According to Week 2 lecture, to make an idea with his technique, there were five steps, gathering raw materials, thinking, relaxing, the Eureka! moment and reworking.
Step 1: Gathering Raw Materials
Input 1
As the first step, I started by getting to know myself because I think creativity comes from what I like and experienced in my life. However, it was hard to start thinking about myself from scratch, so I decided to visualize what I like with a social media app, Pinterest as a photo study. The pictures of the collection on the right are a part of my collection and you can see all of them here.
Input2
After that as another input, I verbalized the pictures of the collection and started to make a mind map about myself mixing the words I came up with through the collection with my experiences. This mind map will be expanded more in the future but now, this is what I have made so far.
Step 2: Thinking
As the second step, I wrote down things that came to mind based on the two inputs, and as I was checking each branch, I found out that I had not read books for a long time even though I used to like them when I was a child.
Step 3 & 4: Relaxing and the Eureka! moment
Thus, I decided to use books for my final project somehow. However, it will not be interesting just with reading books a lot. Then as the third step, when I was flipping through a book, I remembered that I had watched a TV program about two young men who came to Japan. They picked the places they were going to visit by flipping through a travel guide book closing their eyes and pointing out a page randomly. This is the fourth step.
I could not find the video of the episode but I found this official website. Although it is written in Japanese, you can see the men are closing their eyes and pointing out the map from the picture.
Step 5: Reworking
I was curious about what would happen if I tried to do the same thing as them. Therefore, I flipped through a book closing my eyes and chose a word randomly as the fifth step. The word I chose was “band” and I tried to ask three people a question, “when you think of the word “band,” what comes to mind?” using Instagram and Hi Native. I got different answers from each person and thought it would be an interesting project that making compositions with things related to a word I choose from a book communicating with people and this idea will be the base of my final project.
