3.1. ENG Creative 4 Real-life Activity NEW

Hanna-Kaisa Korolainen, a doctoral research at Aalto’s Department of Design, challenged the idea that inspiration simply happens by chance, saying:

‘Inspiration is not a mysterious, uncontrollable force that needs to be waited but can and should be actively sought. Inspiration plays an active role in the creative process.’

In her thesis, she talks about inspiration sources as ‘seeds of creativity’. In other words, sources of inspiration are materials that can guide and fuel the creative process.

In this activity, we want you to think about collecting these seeds of creativity. Usually, people seeking inspiration will use hours, days or even weeks for this process. Here, we’ll do a shorter and limited version. We want you to experience the mindset of looking for seeds of creativity and applying it to other problems.

Start by looking around you. You might be at home, at work or on public transport — for this activity, anywhere is fine. You’ll see many products that solve a specific problem. For example, your cellphone allows you to call or talk to your family. Pick any creative outcome that you see.

Now, look at this outcome and think about what its sources of inspiration were. Again, using the cellphone example, maybe it was inspired by futuristic movies, where people would communicate through cameras (this was a radical idea decades ago).

Next, your task is to reverse engineer the product to its initial phase of inspiration: what was the thing (or things) that inspired the team when designing this product? Use your imagination rather than doing research on what the inspiration actually was.

Write a max 200. word description of your experience with the real-life activity.