#ProcessesandPerspectives

[ashrithaachu-blog]

Exploring Creativity

When I was younger, I always thought of creativity as something that had to be taught. I would often associate creativity with school projects (i.e., book reports, science experiments) that were supposed to be graded and compared with others. If you didn’t have the adequate thought process or the grades, I assumed that you could not ever be creative. However, in 5th grade, when I joined my first choir group and began to collaborate with a variety of different people on songs, I began to notice that creativity is more than just grades and group projects. Through every harmony, every song, I challenged myself to utilize different aspects of what I’d learned in order to fully immerse myself in the experience and be okay with making mistakes in front of my peers.

Professor Seelig saying that “creative people are quilt-makers, not puzzle builders,” resonated with me, as it highlighted that there is no such thing as failure in innovation, but rather just another opportunity to learn. As I’ve reflected through my journey with choir and my undergraduate education, I have learned to view creativity as a form of self expression that can be shared with others. Being able to see people’s physical reactions and knowing that you were able to use your strengths to make them happier through creativity is one of the most rewarding feelings ever, and pushes me to experiment and learn how to improve from my setbacks. Whether it be through a simple song with a difficult key change, a crocheted plushie, or a knitted Disney sweater, creativity will always remind me that there is no limit to how much I can learn. 

[reflectshawn]

Exploring Creativity

     Everyone can create but to be creative (or to be a creator) requires imagination + action. Let’s call it “Imaginaction.” Like the concept of Force in Physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, creativity is a force that when present is difficult to suppress. The more pressure applied to contain it, the greater reaction. It will always find a way to push through and find an outlet, either overtly as a creative work, such as art or music, or as an approach to solving problems. Some people are naturally imaginactive, while others claim to lack creative bones or muscles or just don’t have the capacity to make an effort. Regardless of how one’s brain works, left, right, or center, given the right circumstances anyone can be creative.      So what does Imaginaction look like? Let’s make up a simple scenario. Imagine there’s a worldwide pandemic with a zombie apocalypse and that it isn’t safe to eat store-bought cake. In fact, there is no store-bought cake anymore. Sally Spreadsheet and her family are living in a time locked underground bunker, so making a quick run to Trader Joe’s isn’t an option anyway. Sally, who is an actuary, doesn’t consider herself creative and especially under these circumstances, is baking a birthday cake. Sally just used the last of the sugar and flour in the pantry and realized that they are out of eggs. There won’t be any more eggs since they already ate all the live chickens and the goat won’t lay one. What is Sally to do? Does she throw it all away and call it quits? It’s time for creative problem solving! The internet is broken, so Sally will need to resort to using her memory and wits, and available materials. To frame the problem, she determines that she needs an edible liquid with the potential to bind the other materials. There was something about applesauce she had heard a while back, but alas, no applesauce in the pantry. While rummaging through her personal stash she comes across a package of freeze-dried bananas and remembers that they became sticky after she licked her fingers and reached into the bag for another one. Sally has a “Eureka” moment and restructures the problem. What if the ingredient doesn’t need to start as a liquid, but becomes liquified for the recipe? Sally decides to grind the bananas to a powder using the food processor (they still have electricity) and then reconstitute it with some water. She adds about two ounces to the mix and the cake bakes up perfectly. Sally has used her imagination and taken action to solve the problem. Imaginaction at its finest.      Given my background in marketing you might be surprised to read that creativity, or at least creative involvement, always felt elusive and just out of reach. On the one hand, I had a succession of six bosses in eight years and the absence of a clearly defined role. Without the support of a champion it was difficult to move within the organization. On the other hand, ironically there wasn’t much room for creativity in the creative process. It was a finely tuned machine that repeatedly turned out tentpole film releases with #1 weekend box office results. The creative executives I worked with didn’t actually do much creative anyway. They were armchair quarterbacks who directed creation of materials at various agencies. Sitting alone in an office all day felt like a lonely proposition, so I didn’t pursue that track when I finally had the chance. In any case, the creator in me developed my own side projects as creative outlets, including a television show, web application, immersive wedding venue, and mobile game. They are still in various stages of development and I continue to push them forward.

[s-benj-blog1]

Process Reflection

As I sit here and reflect on the last 15 weeks of education, I am awestruck at all we have learned and accomplished.  Coming from an educational background nowhere near design, business, or technology, I was admittedly nervous about what the semester would entail.  From the appetizer for the creative problem solving process that was the Integrative Practices Residential to our final project, we began to unpack the concepts behind creative problem solving, the structural methods to approach problem solving, the ebb and flow of divergence and convergence as it relates to refining and focusing, and how to develop a strategy that can be implemented.  

Just a few weeks ago when we began to work in our groups, I wasn’t quite sure how we would be able to collaborate in three different locations to meet our deliverables; however, technology is an amazing thing.  From Zoom meetings, to Miro, to Trello, to Figma, to Google slides and back, we sought tools that would allow us to collaborate across hundreds of miles to focus on how we would improve electoral integrity.  As far as the steps we took, I think every step (accept>analyze>define>ideate>select>implement>evaluate) had a key part in setting up the foundation for subsequent steps.  If someone needed a “problem solving in a hat” list of steps, I think all of the pieces have value that are taken into how teams approach the next.  Even the process journals (personal and group) that felt extraneous at times, provided the rubric for us to build out our presentation from as we chronicled the process of coming up with our voter registration solution.  

The creative problem solving process has been quite new to me and a nice comparison/contrast to the Lean Six Sigma training I have received in the past year.  To know that there are multiple solutions and approaches to problem solving adds more tools to my belt and sets our program apart from the rest.  Until the next iteration...

[79aproject]

Creativity is

Storytelling: Finding ways to frame your ideas.

Solving Problems: Exploring new ways to solve problems. Keep an open mind and allow yourself to let your ideas flow out without judgment.

Innovative: Don't let existing limitations block your ideas during brainstorming.

Emotional: The process has its highs and lows, just remember to enjoy the experience.  

Collaborative: You don't always have to solve creative problems alone.

Communicating Ideas: Don't be afraid to share your ideas, good and bad.

Failing: Explore “good” and “bad” to find the right solution

[ruslpostur]

Definitions of Creativity

How do I define creativity, off the top of my head

The root is Create. Make-/Do-/Build-ability,

It is an ability to put something new into life,

Building not destroying (additive not subtractive),

The application of an unexpected twist or a new perspective,

Combining two or more unrelated (or opposing) things to make a third thing (Hegel), like taking ideas from one endeavor and applying them to another (like pilfering from philosophy to describe creativity),

Applied thinking or applied consciousness.

Maybe a better way to put that is: Mental activity applied to solving a problem or filling a void.

Creativity has elements of:

Randomness and surprise,

Inspired laziness,

Joy, mischief, and fun,

Imagination,

Visualization,

"Seeing around the corner" & prognosticating,

Qualitative aspect of improvement,

Cleverness in the sense of an after-the-fact obviousness or naturalness,

Thoughtfulness and thoroughness.

Trying to define what creativity is and is not is an interesting exercise. Trying to define when the mind is not being creative is also interesting.

What applied thinking is not. It is not:

the act of remembering,

rote memorization,

list-making,

duties,

mantras,

arguing with yourself,

regrets,

backwards-looking,

negative/depressive,

routine or process.

What about being in the zone (ichi no-ichi / mind no-mind) aka in flow aka autopilot? Is that a creative state? Sometimes, I think it is. And other times your brain is just drifting while you do something you have done a thousand times before and you can't remember how precisely you drove home if you thought about it.

[ashrithaachu-blog]

Process Journal: Implementation Pt. 2

I feel like coming off of last week, our team had a more solidified idea of what we wanted to design, as we set a target demographic and medium for how we wanted our product to be offered and implemented. After getting feedback from our professor, we realized that we wanted the product to enhance an already existing service, like an Apple watch, since there is already a lot of competition in terms of the product we are trying to sell. This made me feel really eager as we headed into this next phase of implementation, since it was nice to know that we weren’t starting totally from scratch. 

However, our group has a really difficult time meeting up to collaborate and sync up on what exactly we want in our design and how we want it to function, so the actual implementation process was rather stressful. We used Slack a lot, but it was hard to physically communicate the specs of my designs to the group since everyone had a different idea in their minds of how they wanted the flow of the product to be. While we all wanted it to be as simple as possible, what would the pages look like? Did we want the product to prioritize medical records? Or did we want it to mainly be an AI doctor? Even after our discussion last week, I was still utterly confused (which is rather embarrassing to say so), so I just went ahead and continued building off of my ideas from last week, while my group created a website that would contain our product and the necessary resources. 

As much as I love this project and am passionate about it due to personal reasons, I am finding it to be a huge learning curve in terms of collaboration to ensure that all of our ideas are as feasible as they are impactful. I honestly feel a little bit of imposter syndrome creeping in as I feel like I don’t know how to contribute to the project, since the rest of my group is really knowledgeable and has a wealth of information on how to implement and sell this product. These thoughts race through my mind every time I think about this project: How do I contribute and feel positive about my impact if I barely know the subject matter? How do I make my voice feel heard if we only sync up for 30 minutes after a long class, during which I struggle to understand the terminology that my group uses for the project? What will be my impact on this team? 

There are only a few more weeks left in this project, and so I hope that as we move forward, the collaboration will get easier and that we will settle on an idea and focus on trying to solve one area of healthcare instead of trying to change the whole world. My imposter syndrome may not go away due to how challenging the scope of the project is in terms of the subject matter our group has chosen, but I feel slightly more at ease knowing that our project has the potential to change lives and the future of healthcare. 

[ashrithaachu-blog]

Process Journal: Ideation

The ideation phase, to me, has always been the most exciting, but also nerve-wracking part of the problem solving process, as it is the place where we as a team and respective individuals can get our authentic ideas flowing. As a group, we came to the conclusion that we wanted to focus on wearable technology and how to incorporate them in the healthcare space, and shared our viewpoints on what we would hope to achieve and create by combining all of our ideas. However, even though our group had an idea of where we wanted to focus our energy, the brainstorming phase proved to be rather difficult, as we ended up going too deep into our research and uncovering other ideas that we wanted to explore instead of honing on the problem at hand. 

“What wearable technology should we use? What will it be used for? I want to solve that, but there is a product that already exists; maybe there is a way we could make it better though?” These were all questions that came up in our conversation and made me realize that coming up with just 3 ideas would be difficult, as there were so many problems that our passionate group wanted to solve. The ideation phase was slowly turning into the IDK-tion phase, since I was not sure whether or not we would be able to come up with ideas by the deadline. 

However, after much discussion and idea dumping in a Google Slides presentation, our group began to see some overlap in our ideas and narrowed it down to using wearable technology as our primary product. Since we wanted to keep our idea simple, but still innovative and unique, we decided to build upon the existing technologies and came up the ideas of creating an app that works alongside wearables to detect chronic disease in the early stages, an app that can be integrated alongside Apple Research and targets a particular health issue (i.e., diabetes, obesity, autism, etc.), and a medical records passport chip/transplant that “communicates with” other connected devices for doctors to scan. 

Overall, our ideas could still use a little bit of refinement, as our group is still debating about which direction to take due to the overwhelming amount of research with regards to our problem space, but I am excited to see how we hone in on our ideas as we go through the rest of the problem solving process.

[ashrithaachu-blog]

Process Journal: Analysis

In order to turn our idea into a physical product that would have an impact, I needed to put myself into the mindset of an “imagineer” and look for ways to turn my visions into a reality. 

I began by finding articles that discussed the difficulties of medical records and the ethical issue that this brings to the healthcare system. After reading an article titled “Death By Thousand Clicks,” I learned that the current systems needed to share medical records are outdated and list medications that have been recalled, making doctors more prone to making mistakes through various misdiagnoses and errors. In one example that the paper shared, the doctors stated that “30,000 prescriptions in 2010 lacked proper start and end dates, introducing the opportunity for under or overmedication.” This statement stuck out to me because prescriptions are a key part of the healthcare system and if this basic necessity was not monitored properly, then what was? If only there was a way to ensure that this wouldn’t happen again.

I could probably keep going on about how this one article moved me, but I managed to focus my research on the ethics of using digital medical records to understand how it could be utilized alongside a wearable device. I became fascinated with learning about how we can utilize technology to create an impact on the healthcare system and am definitely interested in learning more about where my research can take me throughout the development process of this project. It just shows that innovation is just the beginning of impacting a person’s healthcare journey.