Our final afternoon at FOTB was duly covered by the very talented Naomi Da Costa, Senior Consultant in our Creative Team, and is a familiar face at Flash on the Beach, this being her 3rd event. Here are her thoughts:
Using Playfulness to Spark Ideas
This was my Third FOTB and I had high hopes. Since its inception John Davey and team have consistently bought to Brighton exceptional talent and gifted speakers. I had limited time and so choose to see something a little less techie and I was not disappointed. I chose to see Eva Lotta Lamm and she was well worth the Journey. Eva is a freelance UX designer that definitely knows her onions. Eva previously headed up Skype’s business design team, and has worked as an interaction designer at Yahoo! London
Eva was a breath of fresh air and I really liked her way of perceiving the world specifically looking at visual improvisation, how one can use sketching and improvisation to facilitate the creative process. Creatives often are under pressure to come up with the goods in term of generating concepts and ideas. However this can be difficult considering time and budget constraints so the point of this talk was to help identify techniques which can aid this process.
In what proved to be a thoroughly engaging hour (I wish we’d had longer!) Eva began with looking at some original improvisation artists across all discipline and so started off with a bit of Old School hip hop and Jazz improvisation:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqizFELL1Xw&feature=player_embedded#!
Or even verbal improvisation like: http://tinyurl.com/3e5hko8
It was interesting to see how the artists completely flowed off each other and really took their cues in developing the lyrics / sketches from/with each other. Really helping to demonstrate the value of a collaborate approach which in fact applies to generating any good idea not least within the advertising and marketing industries.
In fact one could say that this is often where they come from.
Another example that really stuck in my mind was Exquisite Corpse (I think we call it Consequences over these days, slightly more user friendly). A game I have played a few times in the pub but was an actually a technique employed by Surrealists for exploring the what could happen by accident if words and images were juxtaposed by different originators. http://exquisitecorpse.com/definition/Morgue_%5Bthe_corpses%5D.html#0.
Eva’s lecture was a basically a showcase of a collection of techniques and different places we can look to change our perception and help the way we think and generate ideas. She was awesome. You can have a look at some of her sketch notes here http://www.flickr.com/photos/evalottchen/sets/72157607235674386/.
I was particularly impressed that she managed to give the whole speech without once using the phrase “thinking outside the box!”
I guess with the advent of so many channels of social media one point that Eva made which I thought was particularly pertinent was that in this rapidly changing times Good design is about supplying a framework to which others can add. We may no longer the original look and feel can help to generate but the foundations from which great things can come
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