For the past couple of weeks, the Creativity Installation project has had me immersed, thinking about and exploring topics such as form, function, interactivity, collaboration, safety, invention, discovery, and of course, creativity.



Through the research process, I have been able to identify and ground the design language in the history of the Museum’s site, including it’s relationship to the military, it’s proximity to the ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge, as well as the local weather conditions.
I also found some incredible inspiration images! I’m now a minor expert in the design typology of antique horse drawn sleighs and carriages, vintage tanks, tractors and wooden wagon wheels. It’s been interesting to follow my thought process as I connect the design dots between angler fish, snow mobiles, a pair of earrings, steam powered bulldozers, a radiator fan, the sculptures of Martin Puryear and the architecture of Rena Dumas.




It was somewhere between the angler fish and the radiator fan that I started thinking about my creative process. Studies (Getzels 1988) have found that creative people tend to:
• Have a “discovery orientation”
• Are more risk taking than average
• Flexible to changing direction
• Possess a willingness to question norms and assumptions
• Ask novel questions
• Have wide interests
I have found that through the process of gathering a mountain of information and following countless leads, I eventually reach a kind of creative saturation / tipping point. At times it feels like getting sucked into a creative vortex (in a good way).
It goes something like this:
After immersing myself in the subject -examining it from as many angles as time and budget will allow, and after deconstructing it down to it’s essential components- I find that I have to stop consciously thinking about it. I have to allow my mind some time to digest and process all on its own, in the background of my life. And then a day or so later, I’ll be looking at a magazine or a movie or a plant and all of these ideas, images associations and connections will start to rush out of mind – and I scramble to capture as many as I can.
I’ve found that you can’t engineer lucky accidents and creative solutions, but through diligence you can trust (anticipate) that they will eventually happen.