One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to be more creative and one way I’m doing that is picking creativity exercises from the brilliant book Caffeine for the Creative Mind: 250 exercises to wake up your brain. The first
That Looks Just Like Nothing
Our lives are filled with pattern. We see patterns in textiles, building materials, nature, even food. With as much pattern as we see, it begs the question. “Is anything random anymore?” Time to explore the answer. Grab a digital camera. Your task is to take ten pictures of things in your environment that have no pattern or order. Find things that are completely random. Go!
I picked this as a first challenge because I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. Almost everything made by humans has some element of pattern in it, to be fair it’s often functionally needed. Nature also defaults to patterns, trees are essentially lazy fractal patterns, snowflakes are more or less hexagonal, water forms spirals. Even things that seem random, like cloud formations, have a level of predictability and therefore non-randomness. My eye is drawn to patterns and symmetry and found I really had to focus on looking for the off centre, the accidental and the out of balance. That woke up my brain – It was a good exercise!
So I’ve chosen 9 images, an odd number, but nice and symmetrical on the page.
Change Meme 