Something out of nothing

Communicating the idea of having ideas.

I’m planning an ideas generation workshop for a group of first year Graphic Design students at the University of Suffolk. I started by gathering activities I thought would be playful and fun, which was kind of okay but got much better when I was encouraged to develop a theme around those activities, and to have some kind of end product—so the students can see the purpose of play. Nigel Ball, the Graphic Design course leader, suggested Something out of Nothing and that felt really right to me. Creativity is about repeatedly getting past the nothing of a blank page and finding or making something of interest. It also chimes with a lot of my work which is about finding value in stuff we typically throw away or overlook.

I’ll write a follow up post to talk about how the workshop went, but just now I want to talk about how to communicate this theme. I needed to solve that to make a poster for the talk, something to give the students a flavour of the thinking we’ll explore.

I started with this, a circle. Something that could represent nothing in a literal way.

But it seemed more interesting to focus on the hole that was left. The circle can then be used to frame things of interest, so you’re seeing something through nothing. This also hints at the role of seeing in creativity. To see is to understand, we talk about insight and that often comes from shifts in perspective. I think this connection between sight and thinking is important—but it’s less about your eyes than it it is about the level of engagement you have in observing the world around you.

I thought the poster would be a die-cut sheet of paper that you could hang on windows of suspend from ceilings, so you see stuff through it.

I sent this photo of it to show how it might look and Nigel suggested that actually the snap could be the poster ie. use the poster to frame things and then and take a photo. So that’s just what I did. Here’s what I found/shot.

I will also make a set of these window as flyers for the students who attend the workshop, so they can find their own sweet nothings.