MY CREATIVE PROCESS

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My fundamental concept behind this workshop was based off the works of Christopher Bartel (Art, Aesthetics and the Medium) and Nathan Crilly (Seeing Things: Consumer Response to the Visual Domain in Product Design). Both assert the fundamental conflict between creating an aesthetically unified and pleasing design, and creating a design that appears foremost functional. The remedy for this intrinsic conflict is to create a balanced work that feels at home in its setting (realistic), yet is not solely utilitarian and draws aesthetically pleasing elements from other designs. Early on I decided that I wanted to devote this workshop to helping students find that precise balance and where it lies for them. To this end, lesson plans were structured to alternate a discussion of the practical and functional qualities of design and the aesthetic qualities of design. In a sense, lectures alternated between discussing engineering concepts that aid to better understand a "realistic" aspect of design, and artistic lectures that aided to better understand the role of aesthetic unity in design. Of course this balance was not perfect from the outset, and so I continually refined the current and future lesson plans I would be teaching based on student feedback (i.e. increasing time share for activities, increasing the time share of artistic lectures etc.).

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References

Crilly, Nathan, et al. “Seeing Things: Consumer Response to the Visual Domain in
Product Design.” Design Studies, vol. 25, no. 6, 2004, pp. 547–577.,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2004.03.001 (Links to an external site.).  (Crilly et al. 2004)

Bartel, Christopher. “Art, Aesthetics, and the MEDIUM: Comments for Nguyen on the
ART-STATUS of Games.” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 2021, pp. 1–11.,
https://doi.org/10.1080/00948705.2021.1948336 (Links to an external site.). (Bartel 2021)