Introducing Creative Practice

# Introducing Creative Practice
Welcome to "Introducing Creative Practice"! For the next 13 weeks, you will attend one session a week with me while producing creative work by answering a set brief.

For each session, as a minimum you must bring along a sketchbook and a pen. For most sessions you will need access to a computer as well. Any additional materials that are required for each sessions will be separately noted on the briefs.

A few themes will be embeded throughout this module:
- Documentation
- Reflection
- Determining your audience

Other than the above themes, for each week we will look at certain aspect of creating a piece of creative work through lectures, workshops, and set briefs. The following are basic outlines of what we will be covering each week.


## Objectives
Over the course of 13 weeks you will learn:
- How to understand creative briefs
- How to evaluate your creative work
- Developing a personal creative practice
- Approaches to idea generation
- Explaining your creative practice


## Learning Outcomes
On completion of this unit you will be able to:
- LO1	Demonstrate an ability to produce creative work (Experimentation)
- LO2 	Demonstrate an ability to evaluate your creative work
 (Personal and Professional Development)
- LO3 	Demonstrate an ability to present your creative work (Communication and Presentation)

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## Week 1
### Have fun
For the first week, we are just going to dip our toes into the realm of creative practice and deconstruct it a little. We are not going to talk about what practitioner or what exhibition to look at, we are not going to have an hour long lecture about what is creativity and how to be creative. We are just going to have some fun.

Having fun while doing creative work isn't just about making hard work or routine bearable. For creative work it is important to have fun creating your work, in the sense that you are constantly trying new things, being adventurous, be willing to push your limits, your skills, and your knowledge. Having fun means you are creating work that are worthwhile to you.

For the next 12 weeks you may need to unlearn what you know and relearn/reevaluate your creative outlook. However, we will start here.


## Week 2
### The creative brief
For this week, we will take a dive into the creative brief. What is a brief? What does a brief includes? How should one approach a brief? We will breakdown a typical creative brief and give a practical view of what one should pay attention to in a particular brief.

Briefs will be central to the next 12 weeks here but also throughout your time at CCI and throughout your creative career. Being able to understand and respond to a brief is an important skill to have as a creative.


## Week 3
### Crits
For this week, we will look into the critiqing of a creative work. We start with an introduction to critiques, outlining how to provide constructive critique of a work and also how to talk about your own work/other people's work.

It is not enough to just know how to create work, it is equally important to be able to critique a piece of work, either it be your own work or other people's work, as part of self-reflection or as an evaluative step towards the next design goal. This session will aim to give you a basic toolset to talk about creative work constructively.


## Week 4
### Research
This week we will introduce research as a step in creating creative work. What is research, how is research done, and why do we research as creatives? We are also going to have a try at doing both primary and secondary research in class.

Research is not something that is exclusive to the sciences. As creatives, research is essential to the quality and success of our work. We will look at some ways of doing creative research and look at what the difference between primary and secondary research, as well as how to apply them to our work.


## Week 5
### Ideation
This week's session is all about generating ideas. We will look at methods of generating ideas through workshops and expanding upon your existing work.

The classic idea (no pun intended) of a great idea popping into your head while you are showering or on the loo, while certainly do happen, isn't something a creative should rely on. We cannot wait for ideas to suddenly conjur themselves. We can however, develop an idea from a body of research while drawing from past knowledge.

The workshop will push you to generate as much ideas as possible and get you used to coming up with potential design solutions to problems instead of waiting for an idea to appear while in the toilet.


## Week 6
### Experimentation/Iteration
One aspect of creative work and especially creative coding work relies on experimentation and iteration. This week's session will focus on these two ideas and we shall look at how to apply this to our own work.


## Week 7
### Presentation
So far the previous sessions we have done the crits in an informal group setting, but there will come a time where you will need to present your work in a more formal setting, whether it be presenting to your peers or to a client. This session gives you some advice on presentation which you will use to prepare for a final presentation of your work next week.

For this session you have a taste of giving a presentation while preparing to give a full presentation of your work at the end of next week.


## Week 8
### Algorithm
What are algorithms? What are the use of algorithm in creative practice, beyond using prebuilt tools like Photoshop and PowerPoint? We take a look at algorithms, how to visualize them and how to use them in our own works.


## Week 9
### Abstraction
Abstraction is the process of removing something from its original representation and viewing it in a new independent context. Abstraction can refer to the abstraction of form or the abstraction of ideas. In this session, we will look at abstractions in both creative practice and computational practice.


## Week 10
### Writing
Being able to talk about your work is essential to your creative development but most of the time people will be reading about your work. As such, it is always useful to know how to express ideas about your work in writing.

We will be looking at some examples of writing about a piece of work as well as practicing writing about your own work in this session.


## Week 11
### Final brief part 1
This is the final brief you will take under this module. Throughout the last 10 weeks, you should have had a taste of what it means to approach a creative brief and respond to it. Now for this final brief, you will use what you have learned so far and apply it. By the end of week 13, you will prepare a presentation of your work including all the research, process, and experimentation.


## Week 12
### Final brief part 2
This week's session will be focused on the interim crit of the work you have done so far for the final brief.


## Week 13
### Final brief crit
We will show the final outcome of the project in a mini exhibition you put up in the studio while you will present your journey of creating this piece of work to the class.