Crafting the Story of a Place: Omairi

Platform 12:  Waiting on the train to Ise-shi.

This week in my Comics and the Visual Narrative class, we finished our silent comic challenge.  In the silent comic, you may use no words (not language or sound effects) and must convey the meaning of the story through gestures, facial expressions, and body language alone.  I went through many ideas, but something that stuck with me was the idea of a story of a place and how that place can weave people into merging and diverging tales.

This idea has resonated with me since I traveled to Japan.  I think, that often the United States feels so new that as a culture we miss that places cultivate different patterns of behavior in us.  I think, often enough, there is a lack of the truly "sacred space"  and place so old and monumental you feel humbled simply by being there.  There are few places here that give the average population chills--few places that inspire silence.

Deconstructing Creativity: Environment

For my masters project the area I want to explore is the intersection of creativity and games, a broad area, but one that allows me to touch on several areas of interest for future research.  Ultimately the project will have a much more narrow focus.  However, at this stage, I am general reflecting and researching in order to better understand what immediate research and design needs exist within emerging creativity studies.

To do this, involves deconstructing creativity, defining its elements so that I might be able to see what areas a game can build skill or confidence.  As it stands, "Creating" or "Synthesis" has long been at the top levels of Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain, being most recently moved to the very highest level.  This suggests that there are many processes and aspects to creativity to consider.

From "Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Domains"

If you look at the taxonomy, it is clear how many cogs in this domain are relevant to the creative process.  When considering creativity pedagogy or environments to encourage creativity, one must remember the level of cognition necessary, and the structure built up beneath it that allows success at creating.

To deconstruct from here results in a large number of relevant aspects of creativity: environment, motivation, process, and community being paramount.  However, to be more descriptive for the sake of exploring creativity further, I have broken those down into descriptive subsets:  Environment, Motivation, Process, Invention, Reflection, Exhibition.

 

Today I plan to focus on Environment, and explore each other area in depth at a later time.  There is a great deal of content to work with in the concept of a creative environment alone.