Multidisciplinary Art Director Adam Atkinson is a young fresh creative & designer with a Masters in Advertising & Design who also loves bake-well tarts...

Brief: What is creativity? As designers we are constantly looking for creativity in our outcomes. But what actually is it? Where does it come from? Does it exist around us, in us? What links creativity and inspiration? The environment we live in is vital to how we think and what we do, determined by culture, society and technology. Creativity is essential to be original and get noticed amongst all the communication clutter.
It leads to the big idea and interaction with consumers. Some say you have it or you don’t! Spend “x” amount (determined by research and findings) of days exploring and documenting ‘creativity’ everyday and visually represent, explain, present, shock, humor, anything at the end to the audience of how you perceived creativity in your surroundings. Take notice of where you are, what sparks your imagination and makes you look twice? Think about: Collaborations; involving other people or artists; Colours and typography; photography, resolution; Number of days of creative outcomes; Final presentations such as websites, cards, calendars, what creatively fits the work; Substrates used

Solution: I wanted to explore creativity in my surroundings. How would my environment affect my creative mind, would stress or lack of sleep affect me, would being aware of wanting to be creative affect me. Would I over compensate and try to be to clever? I left the brief fairly open with a few constraints such as; each piece must be finished within the same day, no going back to finish off the pieces were allowed. I wasn’t planning on being able to define creativity at the end of it or be able to argue about what creativity is, my main focus was to explore how things in my environment would affect my creative ability. Where possible I wanted to involve other people and see how I would affect them, or they would affect me. Even seeing how them being in my environment or me being in theirs would affect their creative ability.
It was interesting to research how people perceived creativity and their opinions on it. I looked into how creativity affects advertising and also influential creative people throughout our history. The main aim was to produce a piece of creativity driven from my surroundings each day. The amount of days… Well I wanted that to be determined by my environment. How many days would my environment allow me to be creative for? It was difficult to put boundaries or direction on the brief as creativity is such a widely used term and has so many broad meanings and definitions. I kept a diary/research log of each creative day noting down where the idea came from, how my sleep was, was the idea stupid or ridiculous and other forms it could have took.