Summary of the Createathon 19/04/21 – 23/04/21
I took part in a Createathon because it has been a while since I had done a design workshop and I wondered if I could still do it.
During the first day of the workshop I started to remember some of the painful aspect of doing design workshops. For example the time limit, in my opinion, dulls the creative process a bit, so you start thinking of easy wins instead of bigger pictures. There is was also a lot of rambling talking which was a little frustrating.
However…
In the end my group, which was a girl from Azerbaijan and a PhD student who had also work with Seaton Delaval Hall, delivered a pretty good presentation and we didn’t mention social media once! We had not really come up with super great ideas, instead we had kept it pretty open ended and offered the person whose business we were working with only a vague direction for the future. I personally thought that it wasn’t going to go down well but it really did. After we had explained the plans of actions and presented our Pecha Kucha, the client was super enthusiastic, because she suddenly saw her business in a different light. We told her her story but how we understood it and this process of multiple translations help her get an inspirational boost.
What I took away from the Createathon is that what I really want to do as a designer is not give someone a stack of clear cut ideas but a new way of thinking. I want this because that is far more sustainable in the long run and it is also harder to dismiss. You can throw away a stack of ideas but if I have incepted a new way of seeing the world into your brain that is hard to ignore.