Brainstorming Strategies for a Creative City: Presentations and Critique

Brainstorming Strategies for a Creative City: Presentations and Critique
Image: Rashmi Korjan from Studio Korjan, Ahmedabad and visiting faculty at NID commenting on the presentation made by the Sports group

Students prepared brainstorming charts and developed a structure for each of the areas that was assigned to them namely – Art Infrastructure, Healthy Sport, Culture & Festivals and Public Education - all to be used as a vehicle for making the city into a creative resource for its people. While the efforts were made by all groups, they however failed to deliver completed metaphors that were originally intended but they did present an intermediate structure and preliminary models which were critiqued and discussed in the class presentations shown below. The student groups and their presentation offerings are shown below with the respective team members. This time the groups had difficulty in their categorisation and all the groups had great brainstorming insights but these were quickly reduced to simple structures which seemed quite pre-meditated and therefore missed the richness of insights seen in the brainstorming sheets. While commenting on this the teachers diagnosed the effect and commented on possible sources for this problem. Many people have this difficulty in expanding the design space in the early stages of trying to define a space in the search of a deeper understanding of both the subject as well as the context of the situation particularly since the task involved both macro as well as micro aspects of details. the tendency to generalise at the cost of tyhe rich details was seen as the cause for this problem. However an early failure in a design situation is a good thing since it shows the team several insights with a great deal of clariry which would otherwise have been missed altogether. We will comment on the next stage after these experiences are reflected upon by the teams and some of the insights from this reflection are processed with the groups and the teaching team in the class tomorrow.

Image: Public Education exploration group
Image: Culture and Festival exploration group
Image: Healthy Sport exploration group
Image: Arts Infrastructure exploration group