‘In order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative. (…) there’s a process that generates creativity- and you can learn it. And you can make it habitual.’ — Twyla Tharp
Part of my job as an architect and urban designer involves continually thinking in an efficient and creative way to solve spatial or strategic issues. Creativity and efficiency, however, are contradicting processes: the current pace of the world demands us to be efficient, but creativity needs its own time to flourish.
Creativity comes with experience, skill, and iteration, but we can also prompt it by setting up the right environment. With a few simple strategies, not only we can prepare ourselves to be creative, but most of all, we can free ourselves up a bit from the trap of efficiency, allowing more creative time to unfold.
These are three strategies that help me get ready to create:
Fill your creative well
Do the work before anybody asks you to do it. Do your homework. Set up your own projects. Read, read, read. Practice, practice, practice. If you are an architect who designs houses, don’t wait to have a commission to design your first house. Start researching different typologies, drawing options, etc. The same applies to any creative practice. Be studious and observational. Go to museums, take walks, get inspired. Take notes and sketch ideas.
Templify
It’s easy to fall into the trap of setting up fancy autonomous systems that take ages to build and you will only use them once. Real automation is using templates for all the work and systems that can be reused. From admin stuff (standard responses to emails, reports, contracts, etc.) to recurrent creative elements (font styles, trees in renders, little scenes in illustrations, standard details, etc.). Templify all of them. This will free up plenty of time, in the long run, to focus on creating.
Collage ideas
There’s an expression in English: ‘not reinventing the wheel’. The truth is, to be creative or innovative, you have to go first through all the boring obvious options before you have acquired sufficient knowledge to make a breakthrough. Even then, there is a huge component of luck involved in the process.
Look at references and collage ideas - learn from others before starting from scratch. Copy your masters’ work to learn from their processes. All great artists and designers have done this before they developed their own style: either copying the work to go through the same process and lines as their masters did, or taking their work as a reference to reinterpret it in a new piece. Van Gogh’s copy of Japanese artworks and Picasso version of Velazquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ are two famous examples.
These three are just 3 simple and easy-to-do things that help me in my creative process, however, big caveat: creativity is not a shortcut. As I said before (and anybody in the creative industry or artistic trade would also agree), being creative and coming up with innovative answers to old problems takes lots of practice, a fair amount of patience, and endless iteration. A never-ending work in progress.
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Happy sketching!
Ana
How do you prepare to be more creative? What are the things that help you in the process? It would be great to hear about it! Leave a comment and share your thoughts :)