- Today's class

Title: Ideas. Tutor: Daren.

The class started on time, with an episode of a Looney tunes cartoon, about this Coyote that is desperate to eat Road runner (the annoying, for ever beepp beepping super fast bird). The coyote keeps failing on his objective, but he keeps trying. He generates the most absurd of the ideas as well as the most witty. I really liked it. Click here for one of those episodes. It lasts 4 minutes. What a fantastic way to start a class..

For the first exercise we were separeated in 3 groups. Me and 7 others were the observers. Our task there was to observe two different design groups that were trying to solve the same problem. Our role was to analyse their behavior, their organisation, their communication, their time management. 15 minutes. Both groups had the same time to come with a solution. The brief was on how to tackle miss-behaviour in the London underground. Yes, very broad thing. One group came up with a poster, the other group came up with an advertising campaign. It was really nice to participate in that exercise as an observer. People soon forget your presence, you are allowed to move around, observing a group of creative people that has 15 minutes to solve a problem. Great exercise.

Then we discussed what we did.

The rest of the class was spent on solving problems using a process of ideas generation that Daren and Catherine (an other teacher) had developed. It was a pleasure working with my group. The process consists in breaking thoughts into steps. You first start thinking of the context of your problem. You think of the obvious. Then you think of the ridicilously ridiculous, then you fix it. This leaves you with documented line of thought that you can use as an mind map. It also helps you thinking of the unthought. We did several exercises on this. There was funny stuff, there was new stuff, there was surreal stuff..

It was another great day.