I'm slightly obsessed with the TED conferences. I really can't get enough of them and it's a struggle not to link a whole bunch of them to here.
Now that they have the TED iPad app (and my wife got me an iPad as a wedding gift, yay for me and a big 'thank you' to her) I've gone on a bit of a binge. The app is awesome in that it allows you to download talks for offline watching, and has an 'inspire me' button which then asks you to pick a category (inspiring, funny, etc.), and how long you have, so as to find a video that will fit your time constraints. Overall an awesome app, and even better, as with most things TED (apart from actually attending a conference), it's free.
I've been watching a lot of the talks about creativity for the past day now, and there have been some really interesting talks (such as the 12-year old Adora Svitak talking about what adults can learn from kids, and bringing up how kids have the advantage of not knowing what constraints might exist, to Steven Johnson talking about where good ideas come from).
What all this brings me to is my current project at school which is the open ended "design a t-shirt". Can't get much more open ended than that, can we? And when things are open ended like this, I tend to have zero to no inspiration to work on them. Sure I have a sketch book with a bunch of random stuff in there I could just plug into a t-shirt design, and why not? Well none of it is great, and I want to make something great, something that I would wear. I looked through my book and didn't see anything that I really wanted to expand upon for this particular project (sometimes it does work though). I looked over websites and saw a ton of amazing and creative designs, which just made me wonder why I didn't think of that first.
Being so open ended just gives me too many possibilities. I have some fun ideas in my sketchbook that if I were to expand upon them they'd probably make a design, but what if I could think of something better? When I'm stuck like this I like to try and come up with a theme for myself, at least to help start focusing. So I did that, and then ended up coming up with so many themes and ideas I'd like to explore, I was even more overwhelmed than when I started.
Great ideas are often something that need time to mature, but do I even need a great idea here? It's not like I'm trying to stop world hunger... even though if I were, how would I design a shirt around that? That has been my thought process over everything I've thought about or read for the past 18 hours or so, and I'm starting to go mad.
