Lessons

Lesson Info

Ideation

So, let's come back to this "How might we" question of "How might we design a way for a visual artist "to get feedback or have accountability?" So that's our working question here, and so let's do the actual ideation part. All right, so let's actually clean this up a little bit so we have space, but we'll have this "How might we" question. Usually we also keep up the user profile stuff but since it's relatively fresh in our heads and because we don't have space and Matt's right here if we have any clarification questions I'll get rid of this stuff here, and we'll come up with different questions, different ideas for art ideation. All right, actually, if you guys could help me with some of these post-its, we'll just have a clean slate. I'll help you on this side. Yeah, thank you. All right. Now, once again, in a real world context, we would keep that, take pictures of that, type it up, make it look all pretty and stuff, but since we're just going live... You guys all have writing ut...

ensils as well, or? Yeah. You good? Okay. So, that's something to really notice as well when we're doing this, right? Remember the first time the no but party planning? We're just talking about it. And you might have been in meetings where people have different creative concepts and ideas, and people will argue about that. Like, "Oh, I don't like that," or "Oh, that's not gonna work." But nothing's documented, and the point of this mindset and this method of design thinking is that everyone can write on a post-it note and put it on a board. So it doesn't matter if some of us have better drawing skills than others or some people have specific technical skills. It doesn't matter. It's meant to be as democratic as possible so that everyone can participate as an idea. We're not signing off our ideas as ours, either. Once it's on the board, it's a group idea. You can build upon it with a yes ands. That's the point of that, and that's the point of standing, too. So when I facilitate this in real life, as long as nobody has any sort of mobility issues or anything like that, I try to have people standing for as long as possible for this phase of the project. All right? All right, so... let's go with ideas on... this "How might we" question. "How might we design a way for a visual artist "to get feedback on..." "Get feedback and have accountability for their projects?" So. So, one idea to start out with is just an idea of a dare. Like, can you basically issue challenges that visual artists can, like, respond to? Or maybe it's artists issuing challenges to other artists. Like similar to these memes that you see on social media. I'm seeing this meme right now on my Facebook where people have to post black and white pictures of their lives and then spread the word. So, could it be something like this where people have some sort of theme, and then they're daring each other to do that? Isn't there a community? You need to have a community. Definitely. To throw it into, right? Yeah. So, that community can be online or... So, maybe some sort of community space or platform is necessary for that. It could be an existing social platform or it could be some new one that we build. Or new community, all right. And also, you know, try to just write the key word so we can do this quickly in a Pop-up way, but sometimes it's also helpful if you have some sort of visual icons or just a little doodle or sketch. Feel free to do that as well. You know, that also helps illustrate the idea. Some way to make your commitments public so you can be held accountable for them. Yeah. Also identify what are the opportunities that exit. There are some fellowships or... exhibits or whatever that can be entered. Yeah, so maybe it's information. I think that's a theme of just opening this up. So maybe independent artists don't always know about these existing opportunities that they could apply to. I think back to this commitment thing, you know, if we think back to earlier in this class, and we talked about Benny the Blowfish, and we talked about looking at the interior world or at the inner world of a user. We've tried to capture a little bit of that here, but we also want to look around to see what's happening in the world, and so we've referenced that a little bit in terms of these community spaces, whether it's existing social media or new platforms. One thing about this making commitment public thing is like things that I've seen before whether it's like the ice bucket challenge, you know, or something where there's stakes, and I guess like humiliation or embarrassment or something like that. If you don't do it or that you would just do it anyway. I think charity is another theme around that of accountability, so even if you're not getting paid for the art that you're making from this dare, do something to benefit charity. Yeah, and I was thinking along those lines, like a self-fine or self-imposed fine that could benefit someone if you don't deliver something on the time frame or something like that. Yeah, definitely. The other one that we were talking about over lunch is an interesting idea, the chain mail idea. Yeah. So, perhaps like a chain mail portrait. So you draw a portrait of somebody and that could be kind of like a challenge to have them draw a portrait of somebody else and keep that going. Yeah. Similar to the ice bucket challenge. Yeah, the chain mail, so this idea of somebody draws something and then they pass it on. So I think the inspiration that we got from this was a project called The Acoustic Guitar Project that was started by my friend Dave. And he's not even a musician himself, but he basically takes a guitar, goes to a city, gives it to a singer/songwriter, and then it comes with a recorder inside as well, and then they have to write an original song, record it on that recorder, and then pass it on, and then the artist also signs the guitar, and so yeah. It's this chain letter idea. We're also thinking about it as like, do you know the Exquisite Corpse idea? I think the Dadas did it, but it's this idea of like... people are painting a different part of a body or a thing, but it could be different styles, but you don't see what other people are drawing or painting until you pass it on, and then you open it up at the end. So, could there be some sort of collaboration that's sequential but is then revealed later? Other ideas. You know, we can build on this dare thing, which I think we've been doing. We've talked about community spaces but we can also grow this information channel thing as well. Yeah, let's get some ideas from the audience. There's a concept in photography called the Solo Photography Book Month. There might be an adaptation for... 'Cause that actually started as a writer's thing. Yeah. And I know there are versions of it for other media. Yeah. There might be one related to it for painting. Yeah. 'Cause it's community-based. So, maybe it's like these kind of sprints or community-based things, right? Like, whether it's about writing 10,000 words in a month or taking photos or whatever that is, right? So, maybe that's related to a dare or a challenge as well of everybody doing this. Or like, I have a friend who's been doing Movember. So, it's people doing things at the same time with a time-bounded thing. I was thinking about a platform for people who want to have portraits done or some kind of artwork done to connect them with the artists. And so, a platform for commissioning projects. Yeah, all right. Commissioning projects. I wonder if there's some sort of like... Not like ice bucket challenge, but some sort of negative feedback or some sort of punishment. Like, I heard there was something where if you didn't keep up with your habit, like going to the gym or making art every day, there'd be some money in escrow, and then they would donate it to some cause that you hate. Right, so if you're a liberal, it would donate to a conservative cause if you didn't do your thing. So, is there a sort of punishment? Think about the carrot on the stick, right? I guess. So, there's the carrot and there's the stick. All right. And you've noticed here with these ideas, we haven't locked ourselves in to any specific platform or any specific media, right? So, this could be digital thing. It could be an app. It could be a campaign. It could be some informational thing. So, we don't have to lock ourselves into that yet, and this is really good that we're open to a lot of these things. How about some sort of ultra-local show-and-tell, kind of like in your neighborhood or street or something like that where you're forced to bring out something that you produced. Great, local show-and-tell. That's great, so maybe it's like a fair or like a Pop-up or something? Yeah. So, I think that's another new theme here that's actually physical, right? 'Cause community could be an online thing, but it could also be a physical thing. Yeah? A gallery, perhaps? Kind of like an open mic for visual artists? Yeah. And maybe like a MeetUp. I wonder, I mean, I'm not a visual artist at all, but I wonder what the equivalent of a rap battle is for artists? Where if it's like a live painting kind of thing. In that idea of putting it in a physical, local community, I would say basically go to the coffee shops and bookstores or things like that, where there is wall space. Well, bookstores, I guess not that much, but really be very ingrained in the community. Yeah, so what should I write for that for specifically? Local shops. Yeah, local shops. All right. Yeah, I wonder if we could also do something where there's almost like micro-competitions. Say a local coffee shop says, "We have room "for a three by three painting "over our coffee machine." It's just for that, right? So, something that's hyper-local as a competition. You know, to help us expand, I also wanted to bring back that international theme. So, I like these hyper-local things and these MeetUps or Pop-ups. I wonder if there's things we can do that are across borders or geographies? I like one cool thing they have here at CreativeLive, is they have this live video feed to their San Francisco office. So I wonder, could there be something across, I don't know, like telepresence or teleconference where, I don't know, a painter in Seattle and a painter in London are doing something at the same time or something. Some sort of real-time critique? Like a dual presence critique where you partner with an artist remotely? Yeah. There's also a lot of artist-in-residence programs. Say, NYU or Columbia do that in Paris. Yeah, residency programs. And riffing off of this coffee shop competition for a visual art space, if we get a network of coffee shops around the world who do this, and we can have these nominated or selected artwork to rotate. Yeah. Do some kind of stuff like exposure through certain time periods to the different coffee shops. Cool. Residencies. I wonder if we could also do a virtual residency. The idea behind this is folks with day jobs may not be able to take off the weeks or months that are necessary to do a physical residency, but what if you could do one that's, I don't know, on Friday afternoons and everybody teleconferences in or something. What are some... So, once we've done this, so we have a good cluster of ideas already, it's also helpful to think about ways to really kind of disrupt this in a way, of thinking beyond things that exist already. So, how would somebody from a totally different industry think about this? Or how would we reframe this problem of connection? Sometimes that means taking something away radically or just adding something that is like magic, that maybe doesn't even exist yet. You've got an idea there? Yeah, it's a little bit going all over the place, so probably diverging from that. Have some sort of rental that's completely isolated and off the grid so that you force yourself to do that. Yeah. It doesn't include the community aspect yet, but it could maybe address the production side. Totally. Isolated rental, right, okay. But it does create, yeah. Maybe it could plug into one of those other things. Yeah, so I don't know. People who might go there could leave part of the work there or something like that to make that an environment that becomes a collaborative environment. Yeah. In some sort of dimension. Right, and so also thinking about like Matt was telling me about one of the murals they have here in the CreativeLive office. They did a time lapse of the artist doing that, and so could there be... 'Cause there's one thing about getting feedback on your finished piece that's already perfect according to you, but could there be something about where you share the actual process with other artists and people who are interested in what's happening. Similar to those Bob Ross shows, right? Where it's like he's teaching you, but you're also seeing things. Yeah? A walkabout. Walkabout? Like a sort of gallery tour or open studio kind of thing? Matt mentioned that he loves to travel and one of the old Aborigine traditions as part of your coming of age, you basically take a spear and you walk out of the village, and you don't come back until you find out who you are. Okay, so we have walkabout, which could be a lot of different things, but that's an interesting wildcard to insert here that may connect to some of these other things. I was thinking of like a subscription where people in their homes can subscribe to have different artwork in their house for a period of time, and they can provide feedback to the artist. And so, say I just bought a house, I want some nice artwork from local artists or from around the world. Yeah, that'd be awesome. What about if it's like Netflix for art or like Spotify for art or something like that where you subscribe to that, and then you can kind of change the art, and then as an artist, you can kind of feed into that with your work. Any other ideas around this? What if we took out some of these norms, right? Like, thinking about the norms of art, typically artists sign; we know who the artist is. Are there things if we could take that away and made it anonymous and then revealed the person, I wonder if there's anything we could do to play with anonymity. What are other... I also like these mashups that we've started to create, like the Netflix for art or the subscription service. What would Tinder for art look like? If you could swipe left and right for stuff that you liked, could that match you up with a local artist? So you see that this creativity happens when we kind of mash these things up. We borrow from other industries or other precedents. That's the looking backwards thing. We have borrowing from indigenous cultures for this walkabout thing. So, we're starting to really build out this space. Also geocaching for art where you can potentially have a photograph of a piece you found and then other people can try to find where it is. Awesome, so maybe the art is hidden somewhere? It could be, or it could be in a random cafe, and people can actually try and go find where it's located. Yeah, what if it's like a treasure hunt or like a scavenger hunt where there's some clues in the artwork, and so it's almost like a virtual gallery show, but the art's in different places, and there's some story or some mystery that's revealed when you look around? Like Airbnb for art real estate, so similar to like an open mic gala. If you some kind of high trafficked business, you can for a fee or something, they can feature their artwork there. Awesome. Airbnb's for art. Let's try to make some sense and group these ideas. So, we've done some natural grouping, but are there any sort of connections or mashups or just lines that we want to draw or circles that we want to draw around things to kind of make sense of things? And they can be dotted lines, too, right? So, I think there's this cluster here that's around charity as a motivation. There's things here that are around mashups, so there's the Tinder for art or the Netflix for art, Airbnb for art. There's I think this cluster here that's about the local. There's this stuff here that's about information.