Seeing the Ordinary

The major ideas this week in our class were awareness and receptiveness--awareness in terms of noticing things around us [rather than being on autopilot], and receptiveness to different ways of thinking or doing. To explore this, we had a small assignment that entailed a) trying two new things and b) picking something ordinary, and actually noticing our encounters with it.

The two ideas are closely related: you need to notice the ordinary in order to find ways to make it new and interesting, and similarly you can use different/unusual means to view the ordinary.

I decided to take a different route home from school to test this. Normally I take the TTC along Steeles, going from Keele all the way to Markham road, so I took YRT instead. It was fairly convoluted, but I did end up seeing some different scenery from the usual industrial areas and strip malls that characterize much of Steeles, including a house built to look like a castle in a mostly generic residential area. I found myself having the 'oh, crap!' thought of "Is this the right place to wait for my second bus?" And, unlike usual, I was paying a little more attention to where we were going.

The second thing I tried was performing simple tasks with my non-dominant hand (in my case, the left). Stirring a cup of tea was not hard, but it felt a bit odd. Brushing my teeth was another matter: the whole business became really effortful...normally I don't even have to think about it, but now the brush felt foreign in my hand, and I had to adapt how I was holding and using it. It was a new way of performing a routine task.

Lastly, I had do pick something ordinary to pay attention to (on a related note, noticing things is DEFINITELY important, even outside creative contexts. I had a dose of 'I told you so' in this respect on Wednesday night; only after I had pulled the front door closed did I notice that the set of car keys I'd picked up did not have a house key with them, and consequently I ended up having to break into my own house. So you see...).

I figured that license plates would be interesting, as we usually don't give them a lot of thought. I saw out-of-province plates (New Brunswick, Maryland, and Pennsylvania); dealer plates (red on white); and many truck plates (black on white), though surprisingly no yellow mechanics' plates.

The most interesting were the vanity plates, some of which included emblems such as remembrance poppies, loons, etc. In about a two-hour period I saw 44 unique plates (there were others that I didn't quite catch). A few interesting ones:
HOOP DOME (basketball fan?)
SOBERANO (Spanish for 'sovereign')
HAY NOW (?)
GLF 4 ME (golf fan)
AU H20
7 SQUAD (this looks like a soccer reference)
I NSRU (probably an insurance broker)
CHE LOCO (Crazy Che)
HEYYYYY (as in,'heyyyyy, look at my shiny new BMW')
HAUS 10
TEL AVIV
and my personal favourite, MMMMM.

All said, I think I did end up being more observant than usual.

The Bad Beginning

My apologies to Lemony Snicket...

The idea behind this blog is to document my creative process for a course I'm taking--Sketching for Communications. Basically, I can refer back to my entries from time to time and see where I'm drawing inspiration from, and how ideas are evolving. This is important to the development and effective communication of ideas, which are key in industry. Hopefully it will be a good time management tool as well.

After spending the first proper class sketching, I found that I need to think more outside the box. I'm also beginning to wonder--is creativity something that just happens, or is it a deliberate exercise?