Creative Thinking

“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fall.” – Edwin Land

Is Creativity for everyone? Are we all born with the ability to be a visual learner? Can we be taught how to be a creative visual learner,  or are we just born with it?

       There has always been great discussion between the topic of creativity and weather or not an individual is born with it. I am overall very interested in the inspiration of visual creative learners, and since I am very passionate in the major of interior design I felt that this was something that is only appropriate to discuss.

        Recently within the last few weeks I have had several individuals ask me personally questions such as, “Can anyone be an interior Designer?” Or “Do you have to be a visual learner to a successful Designer?” , “Are you born like that?”.

       To begin with, I want to first talk about the different sides of the brain, how each works, and which side is used the most for creative learning. And I want to show learners that anyone can be a creative thinker, everyone just does it in a different way. 

       As I began my research I found this really great article called “Understanding Your Brain for Better Design: Left vs. Right” by Kayla Knight. Which talks about the overall understanding of the left side and the right side of the brain, as well as their traits, and how creative individuals use this to harness their abilities.

       As Kayla mentions, the right side of the brain glances at visual orientation as a whole, being able to recognize whether something is a landscape, or identifying objects. The right side works in a way of identifying the finer details. While on the left side of the brain first identifies the details and uses the pieces to put them together to form an overall picture.

       Mixing and matching all information from each side of the brain, is how our extraordinary brain works in its wondrous way. What plays a big role in the different type of learners is that each of us have a dominant side, which provides us with different behaviors in learning. There are many personality traits that each person has when they either use the right side of the brain or the left.

Right Side:

Those that are dominant with the use of their right side depend all on imagery references for understanding. These right side users are frequently identified as visual learners. These types of learners are usually influenced by feelings, more so emotional, and are often better at understanding and reflecting on these feelings. (Knight 2012) These right side dominants are also very intuitive and interested about the overall universe. Some downward flaws that right side users have is that they tend to be unorganized, have troubles with time management and organization, and they tend to be procrastinators. (knight 2012)

Left Side:

The Left side of the Human brain controls the reason/judgment and organization. Different from Right these left side dominant users tend to be very well organized. These users really enjoy schedules and deadlines, as well as rules and regulations (Knight 2012). They are as well what we call auditory learners; which are better with lectures, using words and sentences to remember things rather than using visuals. These users also process ideas as a bit-by-bit algorithmic way; which gives less overall errors.

These two sides of the brain are called the visual cortex. There is a visual cortex in each hemisphere of the back part of the brain. The left hemisphere visual cortex receives signals from the right visual field and the right visual cortex from the left visual field.

 http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/11/understanding-your-brain-for-better-design-left-vs-right/

Learning Styles:

Along with the left and right side of the brain, the different dominant users all have different styles of learning. The style of learning that best fits with creativity learning as a whole is the visual sensory learning style. The three different kinds of sensory learning styles are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. As well as auditory and kinesthetic, visual learning relates to the essential ways how people take-in information.  These visual learners are called visual, due to the fact that they learn with their eyes.  These learners would rather want to see how things are done, rather than just talking about how things are done.  According to Charles Smith, 60% of people are visual learners (Smith, 2012). These visual learners will get a lot out of instructions when teachers use demonstrations and video instructions rather than the typical lectures.

http://www.grapplearts.com/Learning-Styles-in-Grappling.htm Visual learners retain information the best when they can see – diagrams, charts, time lines, films, demonstrations, and pictures. While verbal learners get a lot more out of written and verbal explanations. 

http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/earlycareer/teaching/learningstyles.html

    Reverting back to the Knight article about “Understanding your Brain for Better Design… “ I love how she explains the kind of artistic learners that either use the left side or right side of the brain. I feel that knowing that I am a Visual learner, I relate tremendously about how each kind of creative designer process's different kinds of art.  She mentions how dominant right brain users tend to be more naturally creative than left brain users.  Since right brain thinkers are a lot less common than left-brain users, they tend to see the world a lot differently from the rest.  They are always constantly thinking about the world’s alternatives, and how each alternative can be applied visually. 

In difference to the right side users, Left-brain users are more common, along being a lot more analytical.  They always feel as if they are at a disadvantage for not being naturally creative.  Which really, according to Knight, Left-brain individuals can be just as creative, just by doing in a different way. And I feel that is ware are a lot of individuals get really frustrated with them selves when performing creative tasks and projects, when they feel at a disadvantage they just give up instead of trying a different application.  

    As Knight goes deeper into the article she talks about how right brain users, learn more towards abstraction art.  She explains that the reason is because of the lack of order and disorganization they obtain.  This type of art, works best with right side users because it gives no limitations.  Abstraction art is considered to be “outside-the-box”. As well as that abstraction art depicts emotion, even without any solid visual evidence. These type of designers or artists tend to pick up on the deeper meaning of abstract art as well.

While on the other side of the brain, Left brained artists and designers are more concerned to a more “orderly” type of art. For example, more photo-realistic artwork rather than abstract.  When artwork has guidelines or a sense of form, they work very well to it.

       After reading this article, I felt that it is very true, when she mentioned how Any left or right brained people can be creative, they just have go about it in a different way.  I know being in a field of creativity; people always say “How can you do that? … You made that?” …. “I could never do something like that” .. “Im not creative.”  But really what they don’t know is that they do obtain creativity, they just don’t know how to go about it the right way.  But then again I do agree with how they aren’t born with it because not everyone is interested in the creative aspects of visual learning. That’s why we have different learning styles and different kinds of learners.

What a lot of people don’t know is that there are classes you can take to be “More creative”.  It’s a very interesting topic to think about, because when teaching someone how to be more creative you have to retrain his or her way of thinking. 

I personally have taken a course that does this. When I was an interior design student at Chico State University, we had to take a Creative Thinking course.  We were instructed to look at every thing in this world differently, rather than how we would normally look at things. For example, one of the projects that we were assigned was creating and defining. We were first assigned to go home and pick out an object that had semimetal meaning to us personally. Which I had picked out a murex shell that my grandfather gave to me years ago; but after we had picked it we had to break down the object in many different ways. We had to break down the overall shape, meaning or object, the home of the object, and any other way we could break it down.  It was interesting to me because I broke down the object into categories, such as :

Shelter

Ocean

Circles

Bubbles

Lines

Water

Waves

Etc.

As we broke down the object, We then were assigned to create a park structure that we could experience in a new way no one has done before.  As I began to sketch out ideas and plans for this park structure, I came up with an idea of creating a Rain-water experience that people could go to, to either cool off or sit and listen, or feel what it felt like to be in a water room.  Since I love the sound of rain, I wanted to create a space that let us experience rain in new way we have never done before.  When I came up with the design I looked up other structures that may represent rain, water, or bubbles. So as I went further into my research I found the The Water Cube in Beijing China, which is the Beijing National Aquatics Center where the 2008 Beijing Olympics were held, as my inspiration. 

Here are some Pictures of “Rain-Water Experience” that I created in Google sketch-up….

 Inside one of the Water Rooms... 

 Perspective View

 Floor plans, Sections, and Elevations of Rain Water 

All over the U.S. there are many institutions that offer Interior Design courses like this one. Their goal is the same as other schools.... "Creating more Creative Thinkers".....