tara's fostering creativity blog

Week 14 Prompt:  Share something that you love about Colorado that inspires your creativity. The mountains in Colorado are a huge reason I moved here and inspire me creatively every day. This photo is one I took from the design classrooms on the 8th floor of the CU Building. I feel lucky to have such a good view every day during my design classes, because it helps keep me creatively inspired.

Week 13 Prompt:  Think of a memorable building you have experienced. What adjective would you use to describe how you felt? What qualities or attributes of the space contributed to this feeling? In 2016 I spent some time in Oslo, Norway and the opera house is one of the coolest buildings I've been to. As you can see from the photo, it has very interesting architecture with a sloped roof that visitors can walk on. The bottom of the building slopes down into the water of the bay. I would use the adjective 'interactive' to describe my experience there, because it is the only building I've ever been to that allows you to walk up it and interact with both the inside and the outside of the building.

Week 12 Prompt:  In what are you majoring, and how did you decide on your major? I'm majoring in digital design. Years ago in high school I was interested in design, but for whatever reason ended up choosing biology instead when I started college. I was studying biology at another school for a few years before this, and I took a technical writing course there and realized that I was super interested in the design aspects we talked about in the class (page layouts, typography, etc). This is what got me thinking about design again, and I realized that I could choose to start over and study design instead.

Week 11 Prompt:  Write about how your thoughts and understanding of creativity have shifted this semester. This semester has opened up my idea of creativity a bit and the class has complemented my design courses well. When I started the semester I was way more of a perfectionist, which was not helpful to my creative process in my other design classes; this semester has helped me realize that good ideas only come when you're not afraid to try out a whole bunch of bad ones. Now I am happy to say that I've let go of a lot of my perfectionist tendencies and don't feel hesitant to sketch out all of my ideas, no matter how bad the initial ones might be.

Week 10 Prompt:  Choose an object or process that has been designed. Try to determine the problem or challenge for which this object might have been a solution. Explain how you came to this conclusion. This is the Ikea BEKANT standing desk. This desk has buttons that you can press to raise or lower it, and it adjusts to a wide range of heights. This object was likely designed to address the problem of lack of versatility/mental and physical stimulation while working. When you're sitting down for long periods of time, your focus can begin to go and your posture will get worse, giving aches and pains which will also take away from focus. A versatile desk like this solves these problems because you can choose whether you want to be sitting or standing at any point in the day. 

Week 9 prompt:  Describe a time that visited a place for the first time. What do you remember? What were you drawn to? Felt uncertain about? If you could visit again, what would you do while there? In May I visited the Meow Wolf exhibit in Las Vegas, and it was a very cool experience. Meow Wolf is basically a huge interactive art exhibit that brings you through a journey. There are lots of hidden doors and passageways that lead to new rooms, and each room has a new theme and art style. I was drawn to some of the smaller rooms or areas that had fewer people, because the quiet allowed me to experience the art better than some of the larger rooms that had visitors everywhere. My favorite room was one that was dark and had lasers that you could 'strum' like a guitar and they actually made music when you moved your hand in front of them. If I could visit again, I would spend more time exploring the rooms because I know there are lots of things I missed!