The longer I work as a creative, the more I am convinced that all creativity lies in a keen sense of observation, and the good sense to take note. Creativity, I firmly believe, is a skill, not a talent, in contrast to the carefully perpetuated myth of the genius, artist, architect, and designer who are all male and overwhelmingly white. The development of creative skills requires only a few accessible things: going outside, paper, a pencil, something to sharpen it with, and time. I say a pencil because a pencil is much less intimidating than a pen, and much friendlier to work with, and does not dry up at annoying intervals. There I said it. Architects, and your pretentious fountain pens! And I used an exclamation point also because I felt like it! Ha! Sharpening can be done with anything sharp. I prefer a Swiss Army knife, a metal sharpener, an HB pencil, and a Moleskine dotted notebook, but presently I have four other notebooks of note on my desk, so whatever paper you aren’t precious about is my rule of thumb. Thinking time, something which upper-class men do seem to spend more of than their female counterparts but notes in whatever form one chooses to keep them, sketch, idea or written, need not take up much time. I have, at various times, kept notes in a sketchbook and on Instagram. A significant portion of my PhD research notes consists of photographic images accompanied by written observations, which are available for public access on my research PhD account.

This morning, I came across Didion’s ‘On keeping a notebook [1]’, again via YouTube. Didion’s work lives on in new media. Didion’s work reminds me that observations fuel the creative life—the acts of going about and looking, taking note, remain paramount to the creation of good-quality creative work, of any sort, whether in writing, design, or the arts. Over the past few months, colleagues have raised significant concerns regarding generative artificial intelligence, prompting me to consider the broader implications of artificial intelligence. Within academia, there are real concerns about the destabilising force that GAI poses to the academic project and the knowledge project. Those of us who work in creative fields face significant challenges regarding the speed of production and the quality of our work. The reality is that new, groundbreaking creative work is phenomenally difficult to produce today, primarily because creatives are so heavily constrained by time. But more so, because our society is so geared towards productivity and the extraction of human resources, we often fail to understand what drives good creative work: it is frequently observation and reflection. We prioritise profit over material quality and longevity. Cutting timelines in design for short-term gains. GAI is merely the next stage of this process, which has been particularly detrimental to the planet and its inhabitants for the past 70 or so years.

Computer scientists have boiled the thinking phenomenon down to pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is only one aspect of cognition. The human mind, however, is not separate from the human body, which is a thinking organism of its own. Taking note, in whatever form one observes the habit, becomes a critical way of combining body and mind experiences, while reflecting. In the past few months of winter here, I have had the pleasure of marking my first-year students’ portfolios of observations and reflections by hand. Each week, I set them a drawing task, in which they were required to explore a different medium and observe something in their environment. I confess that the course becomes something of a grounding experiment for the group, as young people who are somehow unaccustomed to being outdoors find it unsettling. I observed that in today’s world, with much greater frequency than even five years ago, young people stay indoors much more often, seldom venturing outside to sit on the grass or loiter about at all. I was frequently surprised by the reflections, their sense of alienation from the world around them. But they were delighted in the few who seemed to grasp the concept of the project. Although I did not undertake it intentionally, I eventually became an iteration of Tim Ingold’s course, the four A’s. [2] which is a course I understand that he taught at Aberdeen University, exploring serious reflection on the need for anthropologists to correspond with the world. Much the same is true for the other creative fields today; architecture has become overly enamored with the image and building object, with less concern with the human and the material. Here is where I believe taking note comes into play. By taking note, we step away from the computer and gain the three-dimensional insight we need to create good original creative work.

Below are some notes that exemplify what happens when you place people in contact with materials, in this case, a piece of compressed mine tailing that I picked up on a walk around a mine tailing area a year ago. We form complex connections when we encounter things and people in play, and those connections need to be recorded in some way. It’s where good research happens, and it’s where good creative work comes from. A balance of going, encounters, reflecting, and noting!

[1] You can read Didion’s essay in: Didion, J., n.d. Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[2] You can read about Ingold’s ideas in Ingold, T., 2013. Making. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, 1 edition. ed. Routledge, New York. And Ingold, T., 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge, London ; New York.

I hope you enjoyed the read.

Go outside, touch things, maybe don’t lick them!

Brigs