tara's fostering creativity blog

Week 5 Prompt:  Describe a time you took a risk. How did you overcome feelings of inadequacy, fear, and/or vulnerability? What did you learn from the experience? The biggest risk I've ever taken was transferring to UCD and into a completely new major after 3 years of undergrad at a different school. I was on a great career path studying cellular and molecular biology, and I was excelling in my classes and lab job at a highly ranked university. However, I was not happy, and I knew that what I was doing was not aligned with the lifestyle I wanted to live (in a bio job there's not really consistent hours, pay, or free time to relax and pursue hobbies). I decided to not only switch majors, but also to move across the country where I would practically start college over again. I felt vulnerable in this position, and worried that I wouldn't be 'good enough' at my new career path, but the knowledge that I chose to actively change my situation to reflect my best future has ...

Week 4 prompt:  In what ways do you see yourself as creative? What roadblocks do you sometimes find yourself coming up against as you nurture your creativity? When I was much younger, writing was my main creative outlet, and I would often begin writing what I thought would turn into great novels. What actually happened was that I would get writer's block after a few minutes and never get past page 3. If I go through my old journals from when I was a kid I see so many unfinished novels. I thought this meant that I wasn't creative enough, so I stopped writing. Instead, I found that my creativity flourished most in visual arts like sketching and drawing with ink. To me, this is an example of how changing your activity or mindset can help get you through a creative roadblock.

Week 3 Prompt -- What do you do to inspire your creativity?  I'm a design student, but I like to gain creative insight/ideas from all different forms of art. I follow many different artists on social media who create a wide range of art (visual, poetry, design, performance, etc), and learning about the art they create and the processes they use help inspire my own creativity. I also like gaining creativity from movement. Running, hiking, or just taking a walk helps me 'refresh' creatively. Finally, one of the biggest influences that helps inspire my creativity is music. I'm someone who's constantly listening to music, and I like to curate the music that I listen to while doing creative work to fit the mood of what I'm creating.

Week 2 Prompt --  Choose one INDEX award winner or nominee and review their profile and design. Write a comment about the design or invention. The LUNARK design by SAGA Space Architects is particularly interesting to me; the designers took on the issue of housing for future space settlements and built a potential living quarters for people who venture into space. The design is based off of the way origami folds, and it expands in volume by 750% when it is unfolded. They designed it this way so that it is small during travel, because all the space counts when in a rocket ship. They also considered the distress astronauts can feel due to the darkness of space, and they included lights on the inside that change based on the astronaut's circadian rhythm. The most interesting part of the design to me is that two of the lead designers tested their product out in the arctic for 61 days, as part of a larger research mission testing circadian rhythms, social dynamics, and more of peopl...