This week we were treated to something a little different a guest lecture from Hal, a regular visitor to class. He took on a topic slightly off the topic of this particular module, but useful from a personal growth viewpoint, Creative Confidence. The topic came from a book of the same name written by IDEO founders Tom and David Kelley, as a fan of the work of IDEO and the processes they use I was very interested to hear what the main takeaways from this book were. I would also benefit from hearing Hal’s opinions on the book and being able to decide if it was worth reading myself.
From listening to Hal, this book is designed to help people who are seen as creatives to instil creative confidence within others. While I am a designer as is Hal and the rest of my class, in the workplace we will not only work with designers, but we may also work with engineers, project managers or any stakeholders of a particular project. Often, they will say they are not creative or are not good at coming up with ideas I have experienced this in my current role at the university, when I ask the person requesting a design piece if they have any idea what they want often they pass it on to me, sometimes implying that as the designer I have all the creativity. This is not true everyone is creative, maybe not in their day-to-day work but everyone has a creative outlet and what I understood from today’s lecture is that this book will provide ideas for how we can encourage and foster creativity in others. As designers, we need insights and ideas from as many people as possible to help us design the best solutions to the issues users are facing, therefore, we need people to be confident to share their ideas with us.
While this is the core focus of this book, Hal told us of how he used it, hacking it and using it as if he was the person who lacked creative confidence, which he said he did when he first read the book. Using the book this way he could boost his confidence and become a better designer.
The lecture had an interactive element where we were asked as a class how confident we were in our abilities creatively and how we felt about calling ourselves designers. It was interesting to see how as a class we all had a certain amount of insecurity around this, around our technical skills, or being seen as the creative one in a team or just not wanting to let on we were designers to avoid being put on the spot to be creative. It was clear we could all do with some more creative confidence.
As I was interested in the topic of creative confidence especially as I am not far away from starting a year-long work placement where I will be working both alongside other designers but also with other professions. I searched for the book online and as part of the reading I did about the book and its author I found a TED talk by David Kelley about creative confidence.
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_kelley_how_to_build_your_creative_confidence
During this talk one piece stood out to me, it was a story of how one of David’s friends at school had been working on making a horse out of clay. One of the other members of the class told their classmate that their attempt was awful and did not resemble a horse at all. David tells of how he saw his friend’s shoulders drop and how he never saw him try and create anything like that again. I found this fascinating, how one comment could affect someone so much and how this could affect how they viewed themselves and their abilities. I wonder how many people have had a similar experience; I know I have. I also wonder if, for a lot of people, these negative experiences are why they feel like they are not creative and why they avoid being asked to work creatively. This is where I think this book could help me in my career, if I can help people forget previous negative experiences around creativity and make them feel safe to explore their creativity without judgement, I feel I would be doing something useful for myself and them. I would get different ideas and viewpoints to help me with my designs and they would help to solve a user problem, a win-win situation. It’s this win-win scenario, David Kelley’s TED talk and Hal’s lecture that have convinced me to order a copy of Creative Confidence, and hopefully I can boost my confidence and that of others as a result.
I enjoyed this week’s lecture, it was interesting to step away from the module content and look at something different, it was nice to mix it up. As this was Hal’s first lecture it wasn’t boring and it didn’t drag I think involving us in what he was saying helped. I also think the fact that it was a topic Hal was passionate about helped and you could tell that from how he spoke about the book and what he took from reading the book. I was convinced, I ordered the book.