Author: yiyiliugt

What an inspiration board can bring

One of the exercises about symphony that Daniel Pink mentioned in his book is to create an ispiration board. Although I do not always have my own inpiration board , I know what it brings.

Last night, our group gathered in CULC to discuss our project for English class. We considered our first topic (which was about architecture) again and again. Finally, we dicided to drop it. After that, for about twenty minutes, we just looked at each other and nearly nobody talked. We have abandoned the first topic , but none of us had a specific idea about the next topic, a clear idea that can be a direction for us. Then I began to draw some invisible pictures on the notebook with my finger. I always like drawing. It can activate my mind. I drew five little characters, which represented our five group members. Then I thought about where we were from(because that was easy to notice that we were all international students). And I scratched a world map, trying to locate we five on the map. Next I found something common between us : we all came from Asia. We shared connected culture background and similar experiences. More important, our experiences in another country were carved in our mind. The US was a completely new world for us, five students from another continent which was thousands of miles away. Excitedly, I told them my thought(although I was not so sure about this topic) and that was like a spark lighting up our minds. We all recalled our experiences as international students. Then we discussed it further.

That is only one example of how inspiration notebook or board works. Sometimes you do not really know what it can insprire you. You see something and skecth what is in your mind. I think the reason why Daniel Pink consider it as a method to train our right brains is that when we try to put the seperate photos or pictures together, it is our right brains that tell us to synthesize them. Especially for visual learners like me, using an inspiration board is quite a good way. I am going to have a notebook with me all the time so that no ideas will be missed.


First step to a project

Last Friday, we were told to create a project in groups. The project is supposed to be the quintessence based on the individual work of each group member as well as the collaborative work of the group as a whole. We were given enough space to think about it. It can be anything creative. When we just got the requirement, none of us had any ideas. Creative? What can be a creative reflection of five people? After a while, we followed the process below to take the first step.

We spent five minutes thinking about the project individually since everyone held a different point of view towards creativity. Then we began to collect all the ideas. We started with interests. We found three of us were sort of interested in architecture, or modeling. That was a good start. And then we discussed about the theme of the project passionately. It was not so easy to find a proper theme because we did not have a clear idea yet. Someone thought we should consider electronic equipments as two majored in electronic engineering. But this idea was soon crossed out. Even those two people did not want to do electronic equipments. Then we talked about modeling Georgia Tech campus (which was passed over because of lack of creativity), buildings (which were even less creative), some new spaceships (which was not so practical)… Although we did not get a specific topic at the end of the class, we found that thoughts could collide in such an interesting way. We shared ideas with each other, feeling happy to tell others our own thought and surprised about their point of views at the same time. Collabrative work should be like this, giving out and soaking up. I know we can do a good job at the end. We are keeping moving.