Creative Music Generation with Geometric figures

Here is a project which was demonstrated at ACM Creativity and Cognition 2011. Really cool concept of geometric figures and music :-

What is creativity?

Here is a video which tries to define creativity. Hope you all would also enjoy it

 

Steps To Innovation And Creative Thinking

Here is a nice video about innovation and creative.

Aha! Experience and the Ha! Ha! experience

There has been a correlation found between humor and creativity. The more creative an individual is, the more humor can they create and the better an individual can appreciate humor, the more creative they are.

Humor is one of the most distinguishable trait of human mind. It tells us more about how the human cognition than any other trait of humans. The significance of humor stems from the fact that humor is based on a logic which is different from the standard logic. Standard logic is bound by rules and has hard boundaries, while the the logic of humor cannot be bounded – perception is mapped to instant changes in emotion, something which cannot be explained by standard logic.

This is the link to a paper which deals with humor, creativity and cognition.

Junk to Beautiful DIY products

There was a Inhabitat  Spring Greening Contest was held in 2010, where the designers, artists and crafters were challenged to transform useless junk to beautiful DIY. The following are some of the interesting designs from the competition.

Lamp made out of Yogurt Bottles

Chop-flops made from recycled ChopSticks

US Map Art made from Cereal Boxes

Bowl Made from recycled Soda Can Tabs (Competition Winner)

Cone Light Recycled from Used Traffic Cones

Gorgeous Garments Upcycled from Magnetic Video Tape

The various ideas reminded me of the fashion show during the semester, when we used recyclable materials to design dresses.

TED Talk on Creativity and Play

I was surfing internet and came across a TED talk from 2008 on Creativity and Play by Tim Brown. The  various experiments by Tim Brown, made the talk entertaining and fun. I could relate the talk to the class and found it really interesting.

Creative Visualization

The chapter on creative visualization in Creative Cognition was very interesting. It linked the concepts on mental images, creative expectation and guessing. In one of the experiments, a set of stimulus images were given as follows :-

Then, these basic figures had to be combined to represent concepts creatively. The following are some of the concepts which I found interesting :-

Design of World Trade Center Site Memorial

Michael Arad, the architect for World Trade Center Site Memorial was a Georgia Tech Alumni and he gave a talk regarding the designing of the memorial. One of the major theme of his design was that he wanted to commemorate the absence of the towers. The design instantly makes sense as it relates loss with absence, which is an universal expression of loss.

Above is the completed memorial with museum still under construction.

This paper describes the process of architectural design. The paper says that design constraints evolve with each iteration of the design. It further says that initial design constraints are few in number, so architect selects an initial design based on individual choice and initial constraints, but with the first design itself the constraints evolve. So the paper describes an evolving process of architectural design wherein the constraints help in creation of a design while a design evolves the constraint through design appreciation.

Micheal Arad describes a slightly different process of architectural design. He had the concept of building a memorial using the theme of absence, two years before the competition was announced. He had made some initial sketches of the design as he was personally interested in building the design. After the competition was announced, he just elaborated his initial design. Although the minor changes were made in the design once the construction began, but there was no evolution in the basic design. Another striking feature of his design is the simplicity with which it conveyed the message.

Paper Flag-post

While trying to make the highest tower with newspapers, our goal was to build a strong base which shall hold the weight on the top of it. Our idea was to build something like a flag-post, where it had a strong base to sustain a tall and thin structure on the top of it. Here are a few pictures which we took while building the paper-tower and after its completion.

Trying to build a strong base with lots of newspaper bundled and tied with paper itself.

After the base, building a  tall and thin paper roll and fixing it together with the base.

Everything ready and done.

Instructions for Unit Origami