Three moments (creatively)

This was a project I recently gave my students at college. The title being; "Three Moments in time". As always with these creative thinking projects I wanted to explore the possibilities of looking a little deeper at the process of thinking rather than creating. After all, it is very simple indeed to get a load of images of Google or take some shots of a candle or cigarette burning down.

This wasn't really the point to this project. And so many times I find that the student end up resulting something out in that fashion. "Three moments in time" as a key starting point will, like any subject, deliver cliched initial concepts in the mind. As mentioned before, we can all find them around us, hence their categorisation as cliched. To aid the students I tried to go through the process of defining how I saw a clever alternative. This was my result (above), based on a concept that followed the following path:

1) First to take a great deal of time to research many aspects of time. The measurement, the values, the variables, the concept, the myth, etc. Everything really that could help promote some notions about the next phase.

2) This was to then explore some of these possibilities as a division set in three. Looking at history, form and other methods to create the necessary division. In my case, I was in a discussion with the students about time. The first starting point is to test your own knowledge. So, in a discursive brainstorming session we looked at what we knew. I mentioned Einstein as a key element to time, as he developed to understanding of the doppler affect. Now, I was talking to the students about what this theory was, and I said then...

3) in the creative aspect of this, that I appreciate clever minimalism in design. So I looked a little further at the ways that I could promote this in a quick and easy form and the end result was achieved as seen above.

This process doesn't work all the time in every given project, but it can help if, by using the lateral thinking method, give alternative ways by which to seek out paths of information that could generate a new and clever concept. As I do remind the students, the subject is creative thinking, not cliched thinking.