In college, I took a graphic design class with an interesting assignment: Use two shapes to create a third shape in the white space. I mirrored two twos to create a heart between them.
What I loved about this project was that it taught me to see something where there wasn’t anything, to look at something ordinary and find something new.
Many, many years later, I learned the flip side of this game. Sitting in a crowded restaurant after a Frozen 2 matinee, my friend Nadia taught me a brilliant way to keep our two little ones entertained: She flipped over the children’s menu, created four quadrants on the blank page, drew different squiggles in each one, and tasked the kids with turning each random shape into a picture. I watched as a spiral became a snail, a triangle turned into half a bow tie, and a lopsided S morphed into a goose-like bird.
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A blank page can be intimidating, even daunting. Sometimes a prompt, a squiggle, a little constraint can be the thing that gets us free-flowing. This is just what studies from Rider University found: In two studies, researchers found students produced more creative writing samples when they were forced to abide by certain arbitrary rules1.
Working with constraints limits the overwhelming number of choices and “allows a deeper exploration of fewer alternatives,” theorized lead researcher Catrinal Haught-Tromp. It encourages us to “explore less familiar paths, to diverge in previously unknown directions.”
So for this week’s creativity play, we have three of our own versions of Nadia’s inspiration-sparking prompts for you to download and print below.
Thinking inside the box,
Kelly