Eco-ntemporary living: Green up your House, the modern way!

Individual thinking and Inspiration

Individual thinking is a personal thought that can be developed by one’s past, surrounding environment, family, friends and personal experience. Normally, it takes long time to develop and has certain degree of subjective opinion.

Inspiration is one kind of thought, feeling, meaning brought by a person or group of person, surrounding environment, words and pictures. Sometime, inspiration comes not only from related issues, but also from personal emotion and thought.

Group process
Group process is a pool collecting rounds of outcomes from every individual thinking and inspiration. An appropriate group process can also facilitate creation, adjust different suggestions and alternatives, and solve conflict and contradiction.

Individual thinking and inspiration together with group process
Now, we would like to use the group process of our group as an example when we were discussing our second material – newspaper.

Stage 1, after the second material has been confirmed, we need to brainstorm some creative ideas by individual before our group meeting. In order to have some insight, we did different approaches to prepare. Some was going to ask their family, friend, and some was going to have some research on internet, newspaper and library. Some was using their past experience in other lessons or activities or directly brainstorming the new uses.
Stage 2, after brainstorming ideas by individuals, we would like to present and explain our ideas to teammates on the meeting.
Stage 3, we analyze the benefits and constraints from each ideas or further develop some creative ideas. For example: we all agreed that using newspaper to clean our shoes when it is a rainy day. Because it can reuse the old newspaper for environment friendly purpose and can shine our shoes. However, the constraint is that it can apply to black leather shoes.
Stage 4, we understand teammates’ point of view and integrate our stands and ideas to conclude our direction and consensus. Sometime, we need to solve conflicts and contradiction.
Stage 5, we find out all the best alternatives.

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There is a simple group process. We can see that the whole group process is mainly to generalize different ideas and thought form individual thinking of each teammate at the beginning. Then integrate or further develop our ideas. And finally seek our consensus and find out our best alternative.

Our example implies the connection between individual thinking and inspiration and group process in our creativity journey. It shows that we can group process is a collective pool which collect our ideas to generate creativity through the group effort during the process. This can really facilitate our creativity thinking and broaden our views.

Inhibitors of creativity
Inhibitors of creativity are blocks to creativity which can interrupt individuals or groups of inspiration, brainstorming and creation. Normally, blocks to creativity can be contributed to two aspects, environmental and cultural.

Environmental blocks to creativity:
1 Physical environment
Physical environment provides space, furnishings, lighting, atmosphere, sound, odor, safety, and comforts of adequate quality. Over intrusion of physical environment by people or things will inhibit creativity. For example: How can you create your ideas when you are under -1℃environment without any protection?
2 Lack of cooperation in a group
Corporation is critical and essential to a group process of creativity. Those People who are unwilling to be considerate and adaptable will inhibit creativity process.
3 Dominant leaders
Everyone’s idea in the group should be considered fairly. Leader who are likely to dominant the whole process are not recommended in creativity process.
4 Lack of help
Resource is the starting point of creativity. A group who are under hunger, illness, and financial worries or lack of information, reference, professional support cannot ensure a creativity process will be ran in a proper way and come up with proper outcome.

Cultural blocks to creativity:
1 Fear
Fears are forms of insecurity. When an idea comes out, it must with certain benefit and risk. People who are unwilling to take any risk and are afraid of making any poor decision, are inhibitors to creativity. It is because they are unwilling to think out of the box in order to secure themselves. [1]
2 Inability to tolerate ambiguity
Creativity can always come from widely differing or incongruous ideas. Most of the time they are some ambiguous concept or idea in the beginning, those people who are unable to tolerate ambiguity may be the inhibitors to creativity because they may be unable to revise those ambiguous ideas to a new and real composition. [1]
3 Judgment rather than generation of ideas
People are likely to ensure their answer for security. Some people can even judge and analyze this idea or concept in an early stage of creativity process. This kind of action will inhibit generation of creativity because those new ideas and concept are retained by judgment before they are properly developed. [1]
4 Lack of motivation
People who are lack of motivation may not be enthusiastic in generation of ideas or joining in group discussion. This must inhibit creativity because the generator is less motivated in generation of creativity. [1]

Enablers of creativity

Enablers of creativity are the facilitation to creativity which facilitates groups of inspiration, brainstorming and creation. Normally, what enablers of creativity are likely to do can be divided in preparation and group organization.

Preparation:
1 Physical environment
Proper and comfort environment should be provided which facilitate the process of creation by reducing insecurity and unsafe feeling. [1]
2 Resource
Resource is the starting point of creativity. Sufficient resource should be prepared before the process, such as tools, facilities, space, information, technical help and professional assistant. [1]
3 Psychological preparation
Good psychological preparation can reduce the possibility of fails. Risk taking, problem solving, open and adaptive mind are required in the process of creativity. People with proper psychological preparation in it can reduce the feelings of fear, unsafe, and ambiguity. [1]

Group organization:
1 Cooperation in group
Cooperation is one critical element of teamwork. Proper cooperation can facilitate both efficiency and effectiveness of the process, and diversify the ideas in a wide and comprehensive way. [1]
2 Leadership and motivation
Each member in a team or group is the leader of the progress. All members have their right to present their ideas and analyze the process of creativity. Also, motivation is the responsibility of everyone, people who are not only required to motivate themselves, but also the whole group so as to maintain the team spirit and enthusiasm during the process. [1]

Management of creativity process
To capitalize the individual and group process and to reduce enablers, we have ideas in resource management and team management
Resource management
More resource can be provided, collected and distributed by the government or specific organization which facilitate the distribution of resource and allow people who are lack of resource can get proper assistance and help. Also, it gives a way for different organization and enterprise to provide help and resource.
Team management
The roles of team leader should be defined properly so as to avoid unbalance authority distribution and dominant leaders. Also, In order to develop a cooperative team, communication, team building and cultural workshops are suggested to be provided before a team is formed. This can facilitate the cooperation of the team and develop each member with an adaptive and self-motivated mind. Proper risk taking skills and problem solving skills can be obtained as well.

As our title mentioned, Green up your House. In the following part, we are going to introduce some reading inspired us for the “Creative Green House” ideas.

Action is louder than words -

What we are doing…Inspiring x Realizing x Reapplying
Practical way to inspire Creativity
Have you even considered how to inspire your creativity in a more practical way? There’s a pleasant idea you can found in the article titled “Keeping a Painting Creativity Journal” by Marion Boddy-evans [2] As the title mentioned, that practical way is keeping a painting creativity journal. You can experience several advantages by having a creativity journal. 


It enable you to well organizing your ideas, inspiration and whatever new you come up with, keeping track on how your ideas expanding and developing as well as refreshing your brain. Additionally, you can always record your ideas immediately which you can make use of them whenever you need them. We recorded our creative ideas on this blog which is a tool that generate our inspiration and ideas in one spot. 


We do hope that it can be one of the ways to inspire you, like how it inspires us on the idea of “Green House”. It inspired us because, it was because of that article a member of the project team referred back to his old art book and it helped him come up with the projects proposed idea, it can be said as a spark of inspiration.

Realization on Creativity
Creativity is not something that born with somebody, we can be either trained to unleash it or taught to repress it. As said by Jonathan Halls [3] of the article of “creativity: What is it?”It is the process of coming up with original ideas and putting them into action which consists of dreaming up ideas, selecting best idea and foremost making idea to be realistic. 


For instance, if you have a fantastic idea for a drama, it will never to be true unless someone work for it. Got it? As what we have done on the Green up your House journey. After having the idea that household can make the world greener, we try to make our novel idea become reality. The products newspaper and plastic spoons are often used and thrown away but in reality, with a little creativity, they can be used for other purposes other than rubbish.

Reapplication of creativity
When we are talking about the reapplication, we are concerning on distancing ourselves from our used way of thinking. As Jonathan Hall [4] describes it, it’s being able to “submerge yourself beneath the surface of an accepted idea or practice and evaluate the very values on which that idea or practice is based”. It is not an easy thing to do, it opens up our possibilities.

The result of reapplying can be powerful which transforms an accepted idea into loads of new ideas. We used to believe that spoons are just a tool, a piece of cutlery used for eating, and newspapers are for reading the news. In order to open up possibilities through reapplying, we decided to reframe our perception on them and thought about reapplying them for other uses in a way that could change the mindsets of others. 

We wanted to make something that will tell the audience that something that looks useless can be transformed into something that is contemporary and useful, it could be seen as more of a sculpture. Our idea of using the spoons to make a bowl will show that with a little creativity, saving the environment can be also be part of contemporary living.

The motif/theme is ‘Eco-temporary living’
As mentioned, the materials we used are newspaper and plastic spoons. Our group arrived at this motif because we thought that the two materials are things that we commonly waste without thinking. Newspaper and plastic spoon are popular items which could be easily be found around us whether it’s at home or at the school canteen, but people seldom pay attention to them.

People only used it once and never recycle or reuse it. For example the free newspaper in Hong Kong, people only read it once and will throw it away immediately. The plastic spoon used after BBQ or birthday party will be discarded after celebration. Our key motivator was watching everyone at our university canteen using the plastic cutleries and throwing them away after, this happens all the time and no one notices how many plastic cutleries is discarded.

This made us think about it’s effects on the environmental and how much of an impact it would have on the future of our world if everyone continued this way. Therefore, our group was inspired to act on this problem, we had to find a way to inspire people on how something so useless can be transformed into something useful or beautiful. Newspaper can have multiple uses which we usually ignore in our daily life, we wanted to surprise the audience with the number of uses newspaper can have other then reading, and plastic spoons is our initial weapon to convince and persuade the audience of how creativity can turn something so useless to something that can be seen as a contemporary object that can be used in the household.

In this way, the behaviors of the audience can change and become more sensitive to the things they use around them. With creativity, our everyday life could be full of eco-temporary ideas. Therefore, our theme is ‘Eco-temporary living’. This derived from the idea of trying to make living environmental friendly is a modern way of living, and it was also a way of making people think forward and how we should be living, contemporary and clean/green.

Metaphor: Greedy
Implication of ‘greedy’
1. Greedy = green daily. The word ‘Greedy’ can be viewed as the combination of the words ‘green’ and ‘daily’. It fits and represents our theme ‘everyday household green’. It implies green and environment ideas can permeate into our daily life. With creativity, we can use newspaper in multiple usages and turn plastic spoons into other usable objects. Since they are daily re-usable items which people always waste, we can in fact turn them into environmental friendly items.

2. The greedy nature of human being also represents our thinking process. General public and household are greedy because they use disposable items for the seek of convenience. They collect free newspaper just because they do not have to pay, even they will only read it briefly or even they have bought one. The greediness is shown in the increasing wastage of newspaper and disposable items which inspired our group to act.

3. One important thinking process of our group is we want to achieve a balance in our life, convenience and environmentally friendly. Some may say we are ‘greedy’ because convenience is somehow contradicted with environmentally friendly. It is quite difficult to maintain a balance between two. That is why we try to think other possibilities of the newspaper usage and create other objects with spoons.

Objects and ideas forgo
Our group forgoes the idea of using plastic spoons as accessories. At the beginning when we were brainstorming what can be created by using plastic spoon, we tried to connect it with modern fashion as more and more fashion brand has a serious collection of plastic accessories. However, we did not turn it into real projects because accessory is not a kind of household item, while the others projects that we created is in the household item category. Moreover, as people usually expect accessories to be eye-catching, fashionable and beautiful. If we make use of plastic spoon, we have to add additional decoration on it, like coating and coloring. Thus we think that it is not worth to create accessories by using plastic spoon.

Another project not chosen is using the straw rather than plastic spoon. We once have the idea of using straw because it is also a common household item which people never re-use it. However, we quickly reach to conclusion that using plastic spoon is more preferable. It was because straw is somehow too soft and easily be bent so it is not convenience for creating creative items. Moreover, our group did research on internet in our brainstorm stage. There are some similar creative objects that are created by plastic spoon. We are really inspired by those ideas and so we finally give up using straw.

References:

[1] Delahunt, M(2009) Blocks to creativity. Retrieved at 23, October, 2009 from http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/Bj.html#anchor38696058

[2] Boddy-Evans, M(2009)Keeping a painting journal: what should you put in a creativity journal and why should you make one?. Retrieved at 2, Nov, 2009 at http://painting.about.com/cs/inspiration/a/paintingjournal.htm

[3] Halls, J(2009) Creativity: what is it?. Retrieved at 23, October 2009 from http://www.icecreativity.com/Creativity-WhatIsIt.htm

[4] Halls, J(2009) Creativity as reapplication. Retrieved at 24, October 2009 from http://www.icecreativity.com/CreativityAsReapplication.htm