This was actually one of my favorite talks… I got a lot of great ideas about how to stay inspired and bringing design into everyway life, not leaving it at work. I have since bought a book of crossword puzzles for the bus, and signed up to design my friend’s bachelorette party favors. Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert from Happy Cog Studios were really charasmatic presenters. Here are my notes…
Inspiration vs. influence
- Inspiration is a sum total of experiences, reacting to stimuli
- Influence is more a copy of things we see in the world
- Book recommendation: “The art of looking sideways”
Ideas for inspiration
- Create an iPhoto archive of things that inspire you
- Sketchbook- always keep with you, test bed for ideas, loose form, spontaneous and unpredictable, helps bring back the feeling of the moment later
- Be a design vigilante- “take back design” by redesigning things in the world with bad designs (for ex. lost dog poster)
- Do puzzles for a better understanding of relations between words and letters (improve visual/ special skills and flexes part of brain that figures out how things go together.
- Recommended movie: “Wordplay”
- Dunkin donuts ex- “unkind donuts” by moving first D to end
- Speaker does a daily heiuku using the dictionary.com word of the day- finds constraints are good
- Find a muse
- Speakers created yearly “Camp Naked Dead” parties and spent months “designing” the party
- Speaker designed his wedding “marketing materials”
- Speaker created Virtual Stan inspired by his best friend http://www.robweychert.com/virtualstan/
