31 Mar 2015

Creative Thinking: Strategies to Develop and Refine your Project Ideas by Node Center

Creative Thinking: Strategies to Develop and Refine your Project Ideas
An online Course by Node Center

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 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.

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.


Full information and enrollment: www.nodecenter.net/course/creative-thinking

- Duration: April 14 - May 5, 2015
- Application deadline: April 11, 2015
- Lecturer: Jennifer Danos
- Participation fee: 148 EUR

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PROGRAM
Week 1: How to be a creative sponge

Idea brainstorming techniques
Mind mapping & other train of consciousness techniques
Practical & unorthodox research strategies
How to foster a creative attitude & atmosphere
How/where to gather & keep this information
Look at types of visual logs
Daily activity: collect collect collect!
Weekly activity: think big!

Week 2: Finding the needle in the haystack

How to filter and archive all that is gathered
Look at examples of this process
Make new connections & find hidden threads
Taking risks with idea development strategies
Continue visual logs
Daily activity: shaking out the gold from the sand
Weekly activity: bringing big down to earth


Week 3: Putting the pieces together

Analysis strategies to assess initial results
Picking one or more ideas to further develop & refine
Knowing when to keep looping back through the process
Group critique past individual activities
Continue visual logs
Weekly activity: how can this be better?


Week 4: Fostering a creative practice

Look at examples of post-production analysis
Analysis of visual logs
Group critique of individual work
How to apply these strategies to a number of different tasks
How to identify & develop your own individual practice
Final Q & A

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CONTACT
www.nodecenter.net
info@nodecenter.org