Today I’m prepping for the class I will begin teaching when the spring semester begins on Monday. It is entirely new to me, and only one semester old for MCAD, and it is called “Ideation & Process.” The general concept for the class is to train the students to think about their work in a fundamentally different way than what they are probably used to. The focus is not on the end product. The class instead turns our attention to the build up that should happen before we make that final product.

No, actually it is more abstract than that. Calling it a build-up suggests that there is an end goal. Really what we are trying to convey is that working as an artist or designer or in pretty much any other creative realm means just that: work. It is a steady perseverance that means generating a lot of bad ideas and bad drawings and bad work that will likely never see the light of day. You must keep at it in order to stumble over the really good ideas, the gems that end up at the front of your portfolio.

As a side benefit, while you are generating piles of ideas that don’t necessarily make sense in the current context of the work you are immediately focussed on, you inevitably spill a few unpolished thoughts that will seep into the back of your mind or get scribbled into your sketchbook or stashed in your web browser bookmarks, and you never know when they will leap forth again.

I’ve never taken a class that focuses exclusively on these types of ideas, but I’ve taken plenty of classes that suggest techniques or philosophies orbiting the concepts. I’m exited to compile and experiment and teach and learn from and along with my students. It is all about taking you out of your comfort zone so you can make some good mistakes and generate new experiences and create some new synapses in your crusty little brain. I am definitely out of my comfort zone, which by definition makes me uncomfortable. But the potential for discovery is huge, and much more than worth the discomfort.

Despite the fact that it is a pile of work and it takes discipline to come back to something day after day where you may not see the benefit for some time, I have a great job. I have a great teaching job that gives me access to other professors teaching these same ideas in their own ways, and I have the great job of putting these principles to work in my own studio.

And I pretty much get to draw every day. What job could be better?

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 11:44 am and is filed under Art, Design, Illustration, Nerdy, teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.