I began a new series recently. The concept was inspired by the Columbus Cube, one of many origami forms. It’s been fun to sit down to paint each of these boxes with a few blank sheets of paper, some brushes and gouache.
Here’s a peek:
Distributed Cognition series
No doubt I’ll be setting aside more time to work in this favorite medium. What inspires you this spring?
© 2013 Kira Campo
This is one of four paintings from the series, Noticing.
The series, which began with the design of a single notecard, includes postmarked stamps collected from letters and postcards mailed by friends over a period of ten years. The line of text chosen for the card is from the poem, April, below.
April
We sat,
enveloped by the green,
which had burst suddenly,
overhead, underfoot.
The firefly darted
in the still-light, still-blue sky
for less than an hour.
I forgot, briefly,
but you remembered to tell me,
“Everything is basically good.”
© 2013 Kira Campo
Since creativity can be manifested in countless ways, discussions of creativity can run both deep and wide. One goal of the Practice Profile series is to reveal, over time, the richness in those discussions by highlighting individuals’ personal practice. Every Profile is unique, as no two individuals share the same creative habits. This month I am excited to feature C. Todd Lombardo, whose creative habits happen to be rooted in visual thinking. The more familiar I become with visual thinking, design thinking, studio thinking and handmade thinking, the more clearly I understand the benefits of each.
Recently, C. Todd shared with me his thoughts on the value of visual thinking:
“I am a sketchnoter, which is a fancy word for notetaking doodler. I like to visualize things as I hear or think about them. This could be in a meeting, at a lecture or a conference or even when I am just thinking about something. At its simplest, it’s boxes and arrows. It is not about being a great artist, nor being “good at drawing,” rather establishing relationships with concepts in a visual manner. I sketchnote for myself, but I have found that other people find value in them, so I post most of them to Flickr. This doesn’t change my practice. In fact, because it is for myself I give myself permission to really screw up (read fail!). If I was doing this for others I’d feel more pressure to elevate the level of quality, which wouldn’t allow me to discover what many like to call “happy accidents.” This is helpful because some are really amazing. I think “wow, I did that,” while others are pretty terrible.”
Posting sketchnotes to Flickr makes his creativity accessible for others to observe. The images, drawn by hand, become an opportunity to learn about the ideas or concepts depicted in the drawings. Topics range from Glen Kelman’s presentation “Where do Ideas Come From?” at the Harvard Innovation Lab to “Human Centered Design, Methods for 21st Century Challenges”. Each pictorial rendering is dense with information, with only the most essential details communicated.
When asked how sketchnoting informs his professional practice, C. Todd explained:
“This practice of visualizing helps me think about anything, and gives structure to my thought process. The story below shows a great example of how it helps with communicating in my professional life. I also think that there’s a kinesthetic value actually doing something with my hands and creating helps solidify concept in my brain so that I can recall them at a later date or even better, when I refer back to the image I can tell the story just as vividly as when I first heard the concept. I also find that it pulls out things that others may not have noticed or thought about. For example, I took notes at a talk given by Hacker Chick (Abby Fitchner) and she mentioned something about “leap and a net will appear” which she dismissed as something unimportant, but when she saw the notes she realized that it was quite integral to her talk and was surprised that picked up on it.”
Finally, I asked for a memorable example that would speak to the relationship between his creative and professional pursuits. His reply:
“A few months ago, I had a phone call with Eli Stefanski from BIF. As we chatted I started drawing out our conversation on the whiteboard and circled areas I wanted to circle back on and dive deeper into. I took a photo and sent it to her as a record of our conversation. Last week we were on a phone call with a few others and she was explaining something to the group. I repeated back to her what I understood the concept was and her reply was something to the effect of: ”Yes, that’s exactly correct, can you send me the picture you’re drawing that explains that? I’ve been trying to distill this for a while.” I chuckled because indeed I had drawn it and she rightly called me out.”
C. Todd’s stories about sketchnoting speak to the value of visual thinking, with the examples posted to Flickr demonstrating that value further. With the promise of deeper comprehension and better retention (not to mention the possibility of the occasional happy accident!) I am certain to be putting pen to paper more often.
______________________________
C. Todd Lombardo, often known as “CTodd,” has over 15 years of experience creating change in the corporate world and is very comfortable navigating ambiguity. When it comes to creativity he believes the power of three simple skills: convergence, divergence and withholding of judgment. He can be found working on a variety of project types such as user experience (UX), communication, design and strategy. In addition, he serves on the adjunct faculty at Madrid’s top-ranked IE Business School where he teach courses in design thinking, innovation and communication. His sketchnotes are often found online, and he believes chocolate chip cookies are one of the secrets to creativity.
© 2013 Kira Campo
Every idea has an antecedent. Last February, when Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like An Artist was published it offered readers a close up view of the people and things that shape his work. Kleon’s first book, Newspaper Blackout, was a nominee for the 2010 Goodreads Choice Award in the Poetry category, and became a Poetry Foundation 2010 Best Seller. Recently, I asked the author to participate in a brief Q&A, to highlight a few concepts mentioned in Steal Like An Artist.
You speak about keeping a ‘swipe file’ and the importance of collecting good ideas. What are some of the more unlikely or memorable source materials that have made it into your file through the years?
AK: Oh, most of what I collect is pretty mundane: newspaper clippings, pages from old books, magazine photos, etc.
You indicate that you have gained inspiration from the poems that others share on your Newspaper Blackout website. How would you describe the creative community that has grown from this reciprocal exchange of ideas?
AK: It’s a funny community, because I don’t know any of the members personally or any of their biographical details, really — we’re all just working in solitude but then sharing that work publicly. The exchange of ideas just comes naturally out of the sharing, not necessarily any back and forth dialogue.
Keeping a calendar and logbook ensures that structure is built directly into your process. What are some of the measures you have built into your process to ensure sufficient experimentation and exploration?
AK: For experimentation, I try to structure my work time so that there are no expectations about the results of the work — it’s more like play, like a kid with building blocks or something. As Bob Ross used to say, there are no mistakes, only happy accidents.
For exploration, I find that sticking to a day-to-day routine means that when you break that routine, the strangeness of the upset and the unfamiliar things you experience work on you even more. It makes the travel and the moments of serendipity in the stacks that much more effective.
You have a number of ‘Deleted Scenes’ near the end of the book. Please select one and elaborate.
AK: Let’s just take “mutations” — sometimes the process of transforming your influences into something new is a matter of the imperfections in your copying. For instance, human memory is a very imperfect device — sometimes our faulty memories of a thing means when we try to replicate it was come up with something new. The voice actor Billy West put it this way: “A bad impression of somebody is a voice no one’s ever heard before!”
Steal Like an Artist will be the focus of the next #creativereads Twitter chat on Tuesday, January 22nd at 8pm ET. Join us!
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Austin Kleon is a writer who draws. He’s the author of two best-selling books: Steal Like An Artist (2012) is an illustrated manifesto for creativity in the digital age, and Newspaper Blackout (2010) is a collection of poetry made by redacting words from newspaper articles with a permanent marker.
His work has been featured on 20×200.com, NPR’s Morning Edition, PBSNewshour, and in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. New York Magazine called his work “brilliant,” The Atlantic called him “positively one of the most interesting people on the Internet,” and The New Yorker said his poems “resurrect the newspaper when everybody else is declaring it dead.”
He grew up in the cornfields of Ohio, but now he lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Meghan, his son, Owen, and his dog, Milo.
© 2013 Kira Campo
While in DC last spring I paid a visit to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, to see The Art of Video Games, one of the first exhibits to document the forty-year history of home video games. The sophisticated aesthetics that we have grown to expect of games speaks volumes about the marriage between artistry and technology. For example, the beauty and fluidity embodied in games such as Flower and Journey would not be possible without advancements in technology. Although attention was paid to the talent that contributes to on-screen artistry, overall there was little emphasis placed on the artistic elements that contribute to video game graphics. However, there were a number of interviews with media scholars, video game designers, and producers, most of which offered insightful glimpses into another form of artistry: that of the gamer.
Storytelling and emotional connection through gaming were dominant themes in the interviews. One of the best articles I have read about the exhibit includes a quote from Chris Melissinos, curator of the exhibit. Melissinos notes that one of the things about the exhibit that has been most rewarding is “helping to elevate the argument about what video games can mean to society at large”.
More recently I was in NY and paid a visit to the MoMA to see Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000, an exhibition that demonstrated, among other things, some of the major influences upon learning throughout the 20th century. Among the early influencers were individuals such as Freidrich Froebel, Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner. The exhibit was an invaluable opportunity to see how learning and artifacts of play have changed over time. For example, while I was aware of Froebel’s influence on early childhood education, the exhibit enabled me to learn more about his methods. The exhibit featured Froebel’s “Gifts”, a series of twenty-one playthings he designed with the intention of fostering curiosity and creativity in children.
Among the many things that struck me was the history of playgrounds in the United States, which developed in concert with the Arts and Craft movement in Chicago. John Dewey’s contributions in the realm of education also added momentum to what was then only a nascent concept of playground, as Chicago was the location of his Laboratory School.
Overall, the thing I found to be the most though-provoking was the method of rapid chalk sketching Rudolf Steiner relied upon for mark-making, in order to communicate “his sense of thought as living, creative energy” and of the individual as part of a larger whole. As I considered Steiner’s methods I realized that part of the appeal was the sense of vitality those methods exuded. The sense of immediacy found in Steiner’s markings reminded me of an experience I had last summer when I participated in my first Gamestorming session. More recently, I experienced a similar vitality, while helping to build a temporary playground in one of Philadelphia’s most famed neighborhoods, Rittenhouse Square. A mere two hours of building reminded me of the intrinsic value of playgrounds, not to mention the significance of the individual as part of a larger whole.
Reflecting on these two exhibits, along with my recent experiences engaging in various forms of analog play, the experiential differences between digital and analog stand in contrast. In a recent online discussion about Gamestorming, there were various remarks made about the benefits of working in analog.
One of the most compelling arguments I have encountered about analog play comes from Katie Salen, DePaul University, the Executive Director of the Institute of Play, in this remarkable seven minute video.
To quote Ms. Salen:
“Play creates in people a reason for them to want to engage.”
As the influence of digital and virtual are increasingly blended into our lives, we face many new questions and new realities in our analog space. Games such as Minecraft seem to have myriad applications with respect to learning. And, as I write this post, in the wake of the most destructive storms I have ever experienced, I am acutely aware of the way technology helps to connect us, and, in doing so, elevates our human experience.
My hope is that the dialogue that Mr. Melissinos refers to regarding video games will continue. Books such as Jane McGonigal’s, Reality is Broken: How Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, certainly make a very compelling case for why the dialogue ought to continue.
As we endeavor to enrich our communities, I hope we will also choose to take full advantage of games and modes of discovery that are purely analog in nature. Why?
Because these experiences will also make us better and will help to change the world.
© 2012 Kira Campo
For the last few months I’ve been working on a series with the title Noticing: An Homage in Analog. The earliest stage of this series began with my participation in Mary Ann Reilly’s CrowdSourcingLove project. Even as I rendered the first notecard I had already begun to envision what might be included in other works. Each piece contains unifying elements—hand lettered notecards, postmarked stamps, a line of text excerpted from various poems, as well as imagery rendered in pencil and watercolor.
Acts of noticing allow us to experience any moment in a rich, full fashion. When we pause, to allow ourselves to become absorbed in the moment, we break from routine and the typical pace of our everyday lives. Though the unique things that capture our attention may vary, these acts of noticing begin to develop the invaluable skill of observation.
Last month there was an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled, How to End the Age of Inattention. The article describes the value of sharp observation skills within the medical profession and cites “museum interventions” at Yale’s School of Medicine as an effective means of strengthening such skills. While the practice of medicine benefits from heightened observation skills in significant ways, the benefits are not limited to the field of medicine. Tony Schwartz, President and CEO of the Energy Project, also made a remarkably convincing case for paying attention in his post, Slow Down, You Move Too Fast.
This summer I have been revisiting the writing of Ellen Langer, whose research examines Mindfulness. Also on my summer reading list is Howard Rheingold’s book, Net Smart. Rheingold advocates that we establish tactics and practices to balance the manner of “information scanning” we have grown so accustom to in the digital age. As I read Langer’s writing again, Mindfulness continues to feel like an important avenue to consider as we strive for balance. In fact, early in Rheingold’s book he asserts, “It’s impossible to separate signal from noise without exercising attention, so mindfulness is a prerequisite to effective crap detection.” (Loc 205)
As for my series, Noticing, the process of conceiving each work, along with the execution, is the point. I look forward to completing these works later this summer, but it will not mark the end of my noticing. Quite the contrary. The series is one of many ways to emphasize, embody and record a commitment to noticing and observation. One of the things I value most about having a personal creative practice is each new opportunity to give tangible form to a lifetime of observation.
The popularity of digital sharing platforms such as Instagram or Pinterest reminds us that noticing can take many forms. Responding to something posted online or posting a new photo are among the ways we demonstrate our instinct for noticing in the digital era. On the other hand, the appeal of a sketchbook, used by artists and scientists to document observations for centuries, is hardly lost. It’s not as if digital and analog are at odds; they may just serve our noticing in different ways.
© 2012 Kira Campo
I decided to dive a bit further into the CrowdSourcingLove theme. The photo below documents the direction I’ve taken. After finishing a final design for the notecards last week, I was able to include one in a collage that I’ve begun.
Here’s a looksie…
P.S. Mary Ann Reilly has turned her CrowdSourcingLove project into a book. check it out! http://maryannreilly.blogspot.com/2012/02/crowd-sourcing-love-book.html
(text on card: Hafez, That Moon Language)
© 2012 Kira Campo
Mary Ann Reilly inspired me recently with a post on her blog, Between the By-Road and the Main Road. It was not the first post by Mary Ann to offer inspiration, and, as a faithful reader of her blog, I am certain it will not be the last. The post was entitled, CrowdSourcingLove, and it included an invitation to readers to express something about love. Mary Ann followed her original post with many others; each subsequent post featuring a unique demonstration of love. CrowdSourcingLove invites others to participate; an invitation to consider further their own demonstrations of love.
I gladly accepted Mary Ann’s invitation and decided to design a notecard. With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, it’s a timely project. It also reflects my preference for handmade notes and cards. I’ve been tinkering a bit with ideas and drafts. As with most creative tasks, some parts have been satisfying…and other parts…less so. Next week, when the project is complete, I’ll share a little more about the tinkering.
Meanwhile, greatest thanks to Mary Ann Reilly for CrowdSourcingLove!
draft for CrowdSourcingLove
(text on card: Hafez, That Moon Language)
© 2012 Kira Campo
My creative practice has taught me more than a few invaluable lessons through the years. Lessons acquired through the process of expression inform daily life. Once the lessons of art are internalized, key principles become relevant in contexts which are independent of art, as well.
I’ve written about lessons before, such as the ability to See Anew or Explore Multiple Angles. And I’ll be writing about others in the future, no doubt! But for now…
© 2011 Kira Campo
In 2001 I took part in a painting workshop that changed my relationship to artmaking in a very fundamental way. While I had dabbled in various creative pursuits for much of my life, only after this particular workshop did I begin to accurately appreciate the value of those pursuits. Over the last ten years I have experienced how maintaining a personal creative practice yields a remarkable return on investment.
The workshop emphasized the basic elements of design: color/line/texture/form/etc. It was an opportunity to explore the fundamentals, relying only upon basic technique. Without rigid structure, it afforded ample space to experiment. In doing so, the workshop facilitated deep engagement by providing sufficient time and conditions (through acts of painting and collage) that were favorable for open-ended exploration.
Though the exercises would change each week, every exercise served as a lesson in observation and reflection. I was deeply engaged during each two-hour session. Over time I noticed that many of the skills activated by this new hobby also informed the hours between my weekly sessions. As a result of artmaking I was developing a sensitivity to details like texture/shadow/color/line. Increasingly this sensitivity extended into everyday life, and I began to attend to aesthetics during my non-painting hours much more vividly. This new lens was a direct result of a shift in my attention, born from a desire to express abstraction on the page in an authentic way. Researcher Ellen Langer explores this manner of conscious attentiveness brilliantly in her book, ‘Mindfulness’.
One summer, several years later, I conducted a painting workshop as a volunteer in an assisted living facility. The experience of deep engagement I had found through painting was echoed in the stories that were told to me by some of the participants. Their own lives were enriched as a result of their increased awareness to detail and nuance, much like mine had been years before. Eric Booth, in his book ‘The Everyday Work of Art’, describes the nature of such awareness in exquisite detail.
The true return on investment I gain from painting is never the completed painting. No, my technical skills are still a work in progress (a fact that often motivates me to devote more time to the craft of painting!). The greatest benefits are the Habits of Mind that result from the act of painting, habits that inform and improve my everyday life. Awareness through deep engagement enables me to think more critically and creatively, which extends into my relationships, my professional life and my academic pursuits.
Painting, much like watching a live performance, sensitizes me to my own interior world, and, more broadly, to humanity. Once I learned to consciously traverse the terrain of deep engagement, I began to regard the thinking skills I had acquired through the process of painting as invaluable life skills. Knowing the dividends that I will receive from a regular practice of artmaking makes it far easier for me to choose how to invest my time.
© 2011 Kira Campo
