Stages of the creative process:
After watching Tony Schwartz’s: To Solve Big Problems, Change Your Process I wanted to write his process with my own thoughts and words. I’m mainly projecting this idea in an academic setting and hope to give those interested in architecture, or any creative field, an insight of the process of creativity as well as a reassurance to those who feel stuck and don’t know how to move forward.
I’ve written about how to come up with a concept (to me, the word concept has become taboo, that’s a story for another time) and how to get the creative process going; both posts talking about how to spark creativity but not about the process of creativity.
What happens during the creative process? How do we get to one stage to another? How does an idea get transformed into reality?
I hope to answer some of these questions.
Every creative project starts with the intentions to solve or fix a problem; whether the problem is housing a sustainable community, making a bike helmet more wind-dynamic, or branding a new company. There are multiple creative and diverse industries that all revolve around solving and answering to a problem.
Finding and defining the problem or question at hand is an essential step. Outlining the issue is the starting point of imaginative and intuitive discovery; it tells us where to start looking and how. For instance, the way I would go about solving a housing issue would be entirely different from resolving an environmental problem.
Identifying the issue allows the transition into discovery.
Discovering the how’s and why’s of an issue is the ultimate challenge, but immersing ourselves in the known is a rewarding accomplishment. To come up with answers we need to learn the past, what has come before and how did it get to this point now. The gathering of information creates a strong foundation to any creative project.
As architecture students we learn about architecture history, we understand precedents, we research, we sketch, we make, and we conclude. These are all key skills that we should use during this process.
What I have found a lot of people do, myself included, is look at inspiration thinking it can solve my issue but it can’t and it shouldn’t. ‘Don’t Waste Your Time on Inspiration’ because to solve our particular problem, we need to find the solutions through research and development. The learning and understanding process is how ideas form, not looking for inspiration.
I think and will always think knowledge (particularly about the problem at hand we are trying to solve) is power and holds a strong foundation to how we stir creativity inside us.
At different points of the creative process there is time when thinking needs to be put aside. When we engross ourselves into a project too much, we start to lose momentum, things get too frustrating and ideas don’t move forward. Taking a break allows a shift in thinking to happen whether we are aware of it or not; when we turn our brains off and we aren’t actively seeking for an answer, we permit the mind to breathe. Learn to value turning off the brain because most of our best ideas come when we are doing simple tasks such as showering, driving or walking. The greatest times we get our best ideas are not when we are searching for our best ideas.
The average creative process will ask for multiple breaks and we shouldn’t fight them, we never know when that ‘ah ha’ moment will come. During the ‘Saturation’ time, we should expand our minds in knowledge and then walk away from it after we digest it all.
These are the ‘ah ha’ moments. The breakthrough experience is when we figure out what we were trying to solve from the very beginning.
After intensive amount of time spent on discovering, learning, and understanding what it is that needs to be solved, we come up with the solution to that problem almost instantaneously sometimes. Through moments of putting thinking aside we sometimes can stir up these breakthrough moments.
The final portion of any creative project demands an interpretation into reality; translating our insights into something that is accessible and understandable is the moment we work up to. Granted in architecture school we always say we are never finished, but for that semester you work your ass off for the final presentation.
The creative process itself is simple; there is a problem, research what makes up the problem, walk away from it, re-visit and research some more, a discovery happens, and finally produce it for the final.
We should not force an idea out of ourselves, we need to find it.
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