photo challenge – Change Meme

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.

Here’s this month’s challenge

What day is it?

The week of seven days was adopted in Rome somewhere about 400 AD and spread into Europe, but it had been recognised long before that in the East. The names of the days are generally associated with Roman mythology.

It’s time they received a contemporary change. Your task is to rename the days of the week to be more modern. They can all be associated with a theme, or they can all have different meanings. They can be as long or as short as your like, but they must all end with the suffix “-day” like they do know.

First up, the names of the days of the week in English are generally associated with Norse mythology, not Roman. Latin based languages adapted the names via Roman Gods, so Friday is named after Frigg/Freya, the wife of Odin. She was often associated with love, and connected to Venus, the Roman goddess of love, and Friday in Italian and French became venerdì and vendredi respectively. That’s the factual detour out of the way, now I can get creative.

First, what if we just numbered the days? Oneday, Twoday, Threeday, Fourday, Fiveday, Sixday, Sevenday

It’s much easier to remember, and handy for foreigners learning English. In fact Mandarin Chinese does this, for six of the seven days, and it is very easy to learn. Slavic languages also use numbers in naming some days, but in a more complicated way, and Sunday is something like “no work day” in Czech which is genius.

A random co-incidence there are seven colours in the rainbow so how about:

Day Day Day Day Day Day Day

It may appeal to people with synesthesia , less useful for people who are colour-blind.

colours or sounds

moods

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.