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This experimental video was based on my initial research question "How can chance be used as a tool to visualise music." I was initially researching John Cage as he was using chance as a tool to compose music; I was inspired by his use of the I-ching specifically.

So, I went on to create a possible methodology that incorporated chance in the initial ideation process. I wanted to use chance specifically to inspire the visualisation narrative for a piece of music.

But before that, I decided to use chance to also select the piece of music I would visualise. For this, I decided to ask chat-gpt to suggest a random piece of music. The random generation of music by chat-gpt was the chance element in my music selection.

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Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt.

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Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt.

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Oblique Strategies is a card based method for promoting creativity. Each card offers a challenging constraint intended to help artists (particularly musicians) break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking.

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Creative Thinking Research as a basis that I can create my card game's foundation working principle.

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Creative Thinking Research as a basis that I can create my card game's foundation working principle.

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Try some of the following strategies for forging creative connections:

Random words. Pick a word at random from any document, then look for novel associations between that word and your problem. For example, if you were exploring ways to reduce sick leave in your company, and your random word was "ball," you might hit on the idea of organizing a monthly softball game, to raise morale and motivate people to stay healthy.

Picture prompts. Images can be a great way to inspire creative thinking. Pick any image, find a connection with your problem – however tenuous – and notice any new possibilities that open up. A picture of a giant redwood, for instance, might suggest new ways to organize the teams and "branches" within your business.

Objects of interest. How about asking your team members to bring a small object of their choice to your next ideas meeting? You could generate new ideas by asking questions such as, "How is this object like the problem we're trying to solve?" or "How could we use this object to meet our challenge?" A stapler, say, might prompt you to consider whether people on your team are becoming disconnected. Maybe you could set up a new communications channel to "fasten" them back together?

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Getting fresh perspectives.

We'll look at each of these elements in turn. Then, we'll outline five ways to foster the best environment for creative thinking to flourish.

1. Breaking Old Thinking Patterns

We can all get stuck in certain "tracks" of thought and fall victim to groupthink. These ideas may be so comfortable that we don't even realize that they're holding us back! So, to have fresh ideas, we need to break away from established patterns of thought and start to see new paths ahead.

Here are some of the best ways to do it:

Challenge Your Assumptions

You likely bring a set of assumptions to each and every situation. Many of them may turn out to be true, but challenging your preconceptions can also open up some exciting possibilities.

For example, maybe you'd like to extend your home office. You know it's a good investment but you don't pursue the idea because you assume that you can't afford it. Challenge that assumption! You might not have the money in the bank right now, but could you sell some other assets to raise the cash? Could you take out a loan and pay it off over time?

Rephrase the Problem

The way you define or frame your problem can limit your creativity. If you describe the issue that you're trying to solve in a different way, or look at it from a different angle, new solutions can emerge.

For example, when Uber founder Garrett Camp wanted to start a transport service, he could have focused simply on buying and managing enough vehicles to make a profit. Instead, he reframed the problem in terms of how he could best address passengers' needs.

This led to the development of a powerful app, rather than a fleet of cars - and an innovative business was born.

Think in Reverse

If you're finding it difficult to think of a new approach, try turning the problem upside-down!

Flip the question and explore the exact opposite of what you want to achieve. This can present you with innovative ways to tackle the real issue.

To come up with a new design for your website, for example, think about how you'd create the worst look possible. Trying to make it boring, frustrating and forgettable may give you some bold ideas for how to do the opposite. (You can learn more about this approach in our article on Reverse Brainstorming.)

Mix Your Media

Radical ideas can arise from tackling problems in unusual ways. A great way to do this is to apply different types of creativity - don't just talk or write about your plans, explore them through music, painting, photography, sculpture... whatever enables you to express yourself. Fresh thinking can emerge when you let your creative juices flow!

Interior designers, for example, often create "mood boards" made up of scraps of fabric, dabs of paint, photographs, sketches, typefaces, or even small objects. This process of visualization can produce original designs that wouldn't have occurred to them otherwise.

2. Making New Connections

Another way to generate new ideas is to make new and unexpected connections. Some of the best ideas seem to occur almost by chance - you see or hear something unconnected with the situation you're trying to resolve, and a lightbulb goes on in your head!

For instance, inventor George de Mestral was inspired to invent Velcro® by the burdock burrs that got stuck to his dog's fur during a countryside walk. [1] And architect Mick Pearce developed a groundbreaking climate-control system based on the self-cooling mounds built by termites. [2]

Try some of the following strategies for forging creative connections:

Random words. Pick a word at random from any document, then look for novel associations between that word and your problem. For example, if you were exploring ways to reduce sick leave in your company, and your random word was "ball," you might hit on the idea of organizing a monthly softball game, to raise morale and motivate people to stay healthy.

Picture prompts. Images can be a great way to inspire creative thinking. Pick any image, find a connection with your problem - however tenuous - and notice any new possibilities that open up. A picture of a giant redwood, for instance, might suggest new ways to organize the teams and "branches" within your business.

Objects of interest. How about asking your team members to bring a small object of their choice to your next ideas meeting? You could generate new ideas by asking questions such as, "How is this object like the problem we're trying to solve?" or "How could we use this object to meet our challenge?" A stapler, say, might prompt you to consider whether people on your team are becoming disconnected. Maybe you could set up a new communications channel to "fasten" them back together?

3. Finding Fresh Perspectives

Finally, you can add extra dynamism to your thinking by taking a step back from your usual standpoint and viewing a problem through "fresh eyes."

You'll often get a surprising new take on an issue by talking to someone with a different perspective, maybe because of their age, life experience, or cultural background.

Or, try playing the "If I Were" game. Ask yourself, how would I address this challenge "if I were...?" You could be an athlete, a successful entrepreneur, Abraham Lincoln... anyone!

Consider how the person you've chosen would approach the problem, and see if that gives you any new ideas. Identify that person's distinguishing characteristics, and use them to address the challenge. The entrepreneur, for instance, might take bigger risks, while the athlete would focus on achieving success through intensive training.

Five Ways to Encourage Creative Thinking

The strategies we've outlined above work best in an atmosphere of positivity and possibility. The following ideas may help you to establish the best conditions for creativity:

1. Believe in yourself. Have faith that great ideas will come! Try using techniques such as positive affirmations to keep your spirits high.

2. Find time for downtime. Some of the best ideas appear when you're thinking about something else - or not really thinking at all: maybe walking, listening to music, or playing with your kids. Rest, relaxation and sleep are all important for recharging your creative batteries. But make sure that you have a notepad or device handy for capturing your brilliant thoughts, whatever you're doing!

3. Vary your environment. Changing your setting can transform your thinking, and offer new sources of inspiration - we've already mentioned the power of a country walk for the inventor George de Mestral. Hold your meeting in a nearby coffee shop instead of the conference room in your office, or ask your people to join you for an "ideas walk" in the park.

4. Minimize interruptions. When you're focused on generating ideas, and feel "in the zone" - stay there! Do your thinking in a place where it's easy and enjoyable to work. Spend some time with your phone and laptop turned off and your door closed, so that nothing - and no one - disrupts your train of thought.

5. Have fun! Playfulness and humor are essential ingredients of creativity, especially if you're exploring new ideas with a team. When the pressure's on to come up with something radical, make sure that you're still relaxed and open-minded enough for the very best ideas to emerge.

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New Ideas - Strategies and Techniques - Inspiring Innovation Through Creative Thinking

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Learn techniques for generating new ideas by breaking old thinking patterns, making new connections, and gaining fresh perspectives.

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in “Card – Piece for Voice” the suit of an upturned card instructs the performer to produce a sound, according to the schema “Hearts: Lips / Diamonds: Vocal cords and throat / Clubs: Cheeks / Spades: Tongue,” while the card number represents the duration of that sound. Other early works operate in the same way, such that each performance changes based on the shuffle.⁶ In 1959, playing cards were Brecht’s favored method of introducing chance into his events, of breaking performers out of their habits, and of taking away the artist’s personal control.

Setting up a system using chance determines the parameters within which chance can fall; the artist knows that a die will only ever give an answer from one to six. Chance operations, in this view, conceal a will to an even greater sense of control, one that wishes to abolish chance itself.

Control is important to any experiment, but introducing chance creates a testable variable whose possible outcomes can surprise the observer.

Chance continues to play a role in Brecht’s proto-minimalist events through the coincidence of word and world. He understands all sorts of everyday occurrences to fulfill the conditions for an event like “Dripping,” without any need for a performer. Noticing a leaky faucet, a rainstorm, or sweat on a hot day all count as valid realizations of the score. For the observer, each is a random occurrence that just happens to coincide with the printed word, which makes the chance character explicit.

chance is ultimately subordinated to interpretation. It is impossible to take in the whole of Deck at once, to try to make global claims about its meaning. So, a randomly dealt hand of cards becomes the ideal way of grasping, quite literally, a subset of Deck and making sense out of it. Chance thus becomes one moment within the larger movement of Brecht’s aesthetic of uncertainty.

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George Brecht's Deck: A Fluxgame (1964) is a singular object, one that hovers between toy, game, and puzzle. It consists of playing cards printed with black-and-white images, collaged from encyclopedia drawings, diagrams, and photos.

The subject matter is wide-ranging and comes from specialist domains: mechanics, optics, architecture, fluid dynamics, sport, etc. The sixty-four cards have neither suit nor number and, despite the suggestion of divisibility into eight groups of eight or four groups of sixteen, clear categories are wanting. The meaning of each individual card is a mystery. The collages often seem to generate thematic associations or visual puns, but they simultaneously resist such interpretations. Instead of looking for an interpreter, the cards need to be handled, to be spread out on a table and piled up, to be shuffled and dealt. The game includes no instructions, rules, or goals, and only the work's title and materials suggests it is a game at all. Yet, the cards ask to be played with, even without any explanation of what that means. People invent all sorts of games with Deck, they collaborate to improvise stories and tell fortunes, they use the cards as prompts for performance, to inspire drawings, and much else. In Deck, one confronts the riddle-like character that pervades all of Brecht's work.

Deck, and George Brecht's art more generally links together chance, indeterminacy, and freedom through play. There has been recent work in game studies on uncertainty as a category that keeps games tense and lively, and this article expands upon that work in a case study to show three things. It argues that uncertainty can be used intentionally and determine the design of games. It also makes a case for being a little fustier with the concepts-like chance, indeterminacy, ambiguity, and the like-that we use to describe uncertainty. Finally, games do not simply mimic the world's uncertainty, but give metaphors for conceptualizing the world as uncertain in the first place. The idea of chance, as Brecht recognizes, is always a worldly idea that depends on the equipment capable of exemplifying it.

Games provide such equipment in the form of dice, cards, coins, roulette wheels, lottery draws, and spinners. Brecht's studies of probability theory and the philosophy of science were what first drew him into the orbit of contemporary art. Trained as a chemist, Brecht spent the first fifteen years of his career with Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, during which time he began experimenting with chance procedures in drawing and painting. A night class introduced Brecht to the methods of Dadaism and Surrealism, as well as the action painting of Jackson Pollock and the composition methods of John Cage. He began to correspond with Cage in 1956, and wrote an essay on chance methods in science and art the next year. When Cage offered a course in experimental composition at the New School for Social Research in 1959, Brecht jumped at the opportunity. Each week of this class, Cage would give a minimal and odd prompt for composition, and during the following week the class would perform and discuss the works that resulted. In that space, Brecht met and collaborated with future members of Fluxus, an artistic movement of the 1960s that tried to merge art in everyday life. For many Fluxus artists, games, jokes, and toys were an ideal way to accomplish this goal-especially when they were made in a skewed or disrupted manner. During these sessions, Brecht began to use chance as a part of the performance process itself. By incorporating text-based instructions as elements of a musical score, Brecht could program moments of indeterminacy for the viewer or performer. Initially, Brecht composed complex tables of values that linked a feature of a playing card to a feature of a performance. For example, his first complete score, "Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event)," is a piece to be played by any number of individuals, each of whom receives twenty-two shuffled cards with simple instructions for operating a vehicle. The cards include instructions such as: "Head lights (high beam, low beam) on (1-5), off," or "Accelerate motor (1-3)." Numbers following the instructions give the performer an optional range of durations for the performance. The result is a structured-but-aleatory cacophony, where cars come into and out of harmony with one another. Similarly, in "Card - Piece for Voice" the suit of an upturned card instructs the performer to produce a sound, according to the schema "Hearts: Lips / Diamonds: Vocal cords and throat / Clubs: Cheeks / Spades: Tongue," while the card number represents the duration of that sound. Other early works operate in the same way, such that each performance changes based on the shuffle. In 1959, playing cards were Brecht's favored method of introducing chance into his events, of breaking performers out of their habits, and of taking away the artist's personal control.

Two common reactions often greet chance-based work, and Brecht's canny and preemptive defense against these reactions reveals his view of the artist's function. A first criticism is often lobbed at the very possibility of chance in art. The universe, by these lights, is determined as an endless and implacable causal chain, and any seemingly random work-such as a piece of automatic writing-can easily be traced back to a proximate cause in the artist's life. Brecht responds scientifically to such skepticism about chance. Since the rise of probabilistic thinking in the 19 th century, the notion of strict causality has been untenable, and the theorems of Kurt Gödel and Werner Heisenberg show that uncertainty is the bedrock of reality. Rather than trying to trace uncertainty to ultimate causes-which will always be uncertain-Brecht brings into focus the proximate and experiential quality of uncertainty. Chance only becomes visible for Brecht when it matters to the observer, when it becomes felt.

The second criticism concerns the ethics of using chance-based procedures. This criticism contends that far from reducing the artist's agency and control-as in Cage's ideal of egoless art-aleatory methods actually extend control at a more abstract level. Setting up a system using chance determines the parameters within which chance can fall; the artist knows that a die will only ever give an answer from one to six. Chance operations, in this view, conceal a will to an even greater sense of control, one that wishes to abolish chance itself. Again, Brecht's response is that of the scientist. Throughout his career, Brecht considered his art as a kind of research. Rather than an ethical constraint, Brecht uses chance as an epistemological tool for creating bias-free experiments. Control is important to any experiment, but introducing chance creates a testable variable whose possible outcomes can surprise the observer. Giving up control is always a relative procedure for Brecht, the production of a zone of unknowing that is partial.

Brecht's vision of aleatory aesthetics, especially as it is articulated in "Chance-Imagery," is more systematic than many of his contemporaries. Yet, Brecht's work undergoes a sudden change around 1961 because of a contradiction introduced by chance. After that date, the elaborately structured possibilities of his playing card works are paired down dramatically. He starts to write simple directions that sometimes amount to a single word and rarely stretch to more than a handful. Indeed, while actual cards remain important for his event scores, as in Water Yam (1963), their content no longer seem to instruct at all, but merely call attention to ongoing processes within the world. Pieces, such as "Drip Music," which in 1959 read "A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel," are simplified to "Second version: Dripping." These works drop the programmatic and explicit tools for generating bias free randomness, and raise a question about the role of chance in Brecht's method.

Authorial control came to present a problem for Brecht after all. In a 1966 afterward to the belated publication of "Chance-Imagery," Brecht writes that he could not "have foreseen the resolution of the distinction between choice and chance which was to occur in my own work." Brecht was not worried about exerting a structuring control over the outcome of situations, but he did recognize that his scores imposed an alien will upon people. Cage said of one early piece that "[n]obody ever tried to control me so much," and Brecht later reflected that he "learned that lesson there, I realized I was being dictatorial." How not to dictate became a problem in his work, and if it was influenced Cage's ethics, it was equally the concern of a scientist accidentally biasing his results. By moving from elaborate card pieces to brief and simple scores, Brecht solves this dilemma by leaving the realization of a given work up to the participant. In his notebooks Brecht invents the "enigmatic notion of 'choiceless choosing'" as a synthesis of each constraint. It is a phrase that points to his belief that choice is ultimately illusory, and can be integrated as one more variable in an experiment. In the later part of his career, Brecht would even claim that "I'm not at all sure that I've ever invited anybody to think or do anything....I don't demand anything."

Chance continues to play a role in Brecht's proto-minimalist events through the coincidence of word and world. He understands all sorts of everyday occurrences to fulfill the conditions for an event like "Dripping," without any need for a performer. Noticing a leaky faucet, a rainstorm, or sweat on a hot day all count as valid realizations of the score. For the observer, each is a random occurrence that just happens to coincide with the printed word, which makes the chance character explicit. Chance events, though, are only one uncertainty that these scores can provoke. Other kinds of uncertainty are just as, or more, important to Brecht's style. Brewing a pot of coffee as part of a morning routine, for instance, produces a "dripping" that is neither dictated nor random but habitual. The result is ambiguous rather than indeterminate, a small kind of distinction, but one to which Brecht's notebooks pay attention. During this period Brecht began to thoroughly explore the ambiguity that a performer faces when interpreting such scores.

With the reduction of chance operations, we might expect to see a similar decline in the toys and games that Brecht used to model chance. In fact, exactly the opposite occurs. Toys become a staple element of the assemblages and Fluxkits that Brecht created after 1962. Hand puppets, tops, skipping rope, all kinds of balls, alphabet blocks, dominoes, chess pieces, and many more such objects appear throughout his work. Dice and cards persist, but without the one-to-one correspondence between card and instruction that characterized his early scores. Brecht also produced a series Fluxkits with George Maciunas that take games as an explicit theme. In the Games and Puzzles (1965) series, Brecht gives the player outlandish tasks that exacerbate the ambiguity of his simplified event scores. "Swim Puzzle" for instance, consists of a sea shell or ball, and the instruction "Arrange the beads such that / the word CUAL never appears." "Ball Puzzle" gives the prompt: "Find ball under bare foot / Without moving, transfer ball to hand." These tasks feel impossible, but do not demand any heroic effort, only a change in perspective that is just out of reach. Sometimes the task is too easy-CUAL will never appear-and the lack of satisfaction seems to call for another answer. Sometimes the impossibility comes from a self-imposed constraint-I cannot ask someone to move the ball for me. Brecht himself experiences his own puzzles in this way: they are difficult, he writes, "for me too. For one of them it took me several years to figure it out.... I have enough experience to know that when an idea like that comes to me it has to have a solution." Brecht's puzzles give rise to their own answers.

Toys, games and puzzles thus continue to serve as models of uncertainty for Brecht, but in a sense that goes beyond chance. Unlike games of chance, puzzles are ordinarily determined: they have a right answer, and that answer becomes trivial and obvious after it has been solved. Before one grasps the solution, and while knowing it is fully determinate, the puzzle remains entirely uncertain for the solver. By provoking minor paradoxes, Brecht's puzzles extend this feeling indefinitely. Despite this difference, both puzzles and games of chance provoke the same feeling of playfulness. In both, the world feels stacked against the player-either through enormous odds, or through incomprehensibility. In both, it is the smallest possible gesture that upends the world. A single cast of a die or turn of a card is enough to change one's fortune, and a slight shift in perspective makes a nonsensical riddle seem obvious. In both, there is a deep historical connection to the rhetoric of fate and destiny. Julia Robinson characterizes this aesthetic of Brecht's works through "[t]he irony, the quirky reversals, the wit and the occasional moments of sublime minimalism" that it elicits. The point I want to make is that his style is rooted in a familiar pleasure of games, one that comes from exacerbating uncertainty, and one that marks out Brecht's work as playful.

This context helps illuminate the game of Deck that initially seems so hard to parse. Like Brecht's early work with playing cards, Deck uses cards to highlight the effects of chance. After internalizing the problem of choiceless choice, Brecht does not instruct the player about how to play with Deck. The player must invite the game into her life. The individual cards still function, as in "Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event)," as possible prompts. What the cards prompt, however, is ambiguous and riddle-like; they have more in common with the interpretive conundrums of Brecht's impossible Games and Puzzles. The two modes of chance and puzzling come into a tighter relationship in Deck than anywhere else in Brecht's work, and chance is ultimately subordinated to interpretation. It is impossible to take in the whole of Deck at once, to try to make global claims about its meaning. So, a randomly dealt hand of cards becomes the ideal way of grasping, quite literally, a subset of Deck and making sense out of it. Chance thus becomes one moment within the larger movement of Brecht's aesthetic of uncertainty.

We can trace the relation between chance and interpretation further by comparing Deck with its twin, Universal Machine II (1965). This was a work composed in the same year, and with the same set of encyclopedia imagery, which Brecht cut up again and re-arranged to make Deck. In Universal Machine II, the diagrams are condensed onto a single piece of paper, which has been glued onto the back of a wooden box. The box is covered by a sheet of glass, and contains some assorted objects-buttons, metal clips, an awl, or stones-which are unique in each piece. On a facing cover are suggestions for using Universal Machine II, such as "For a novel: / Shake the box. Open. Chapter 1. Close. / Shake the box. Open. Chapter 2. Close" or, "New sciences. Determine two or more elements. Find out all you can about each element. Establish a science which treats of these elements" or, "Need a friend? Shake box." Like Deck, the act of shaking subordinates chance operations to a moment of interpretive uncertainty. Each time, a gestalt forms between the background images and a piece of debris, which draws a connection between two or more images in contingent and reciprocal ways. Unlike Deck, though, Universal Machine II explicitly writes out its possible functions, and thereby draws attention to the meaning-making operation.

Universal Machine II connects the most disparate things into a single universe of sense. By establishing chance relations between its objects, it produces an ontological flattening. An acrobat exists in the same sense as an architectural drawing and a snowflake. Deck extends this operation, which the debris highlights, through a chance combination of cards. Rather than separating objects into things and relations (illustrations and debris), Deck makes the illustrations do double duty by allowing the picture plane itself to move, as cards are re-arranged by the player. The title of Universal Machine II calls attention to a universal flattening. At the same time, the title encodes a critical pun, one that sets up a contrast between Brecht's work and the computational flattening of the universal Turing machine.

The Turing machine, described by Alan Turing in 1936, is a theoretical model of a computer that describes how it is possible to build a machine that can perform any computation by reading instructions from a tape, and transforming those instructions according to a table of values. Brecht was interested in computing, and collaborated with James Tenney, a pioneer of computational art in the 1950s. The above description of Turing's machine-whose first iterations were operated with punch cards-is clearly analogous to Brecht's early use of playing cards to transform an input into a variable output. Indeed, one of Brecht's commentators, Henry Martin, describes his work as "an enormous computer insofar as it accepts any and all information that one cycles into it." However, with his transition away from instructions, Brecht's work no longer establishes a universality through the computer's ability to reduce the world into a series of calculable bits. In contrast to computation, Universal Machine II borrows a model of universal connection from the encyclopedia form, which establishes an aleatory and indeterminate connection between entries. Encyclopedia diagrams use visual strategies to depict objects from a null or neutral subject position, whose surrounding "whiteness is an arena of potentiality that fosters connections without fixing them or foreclosing thought experiments." The Universal Machine II thus reveals a commitment to a particular kind of universality shared by Deck, which suggests anything could be connected to anything else without the mediation of calculation or instruction. Deck further refines some elements of Universal Machine II that remain tied to Brecht's earlier methodology. Deck stretches out the neutral white space between the densely collaged encyclopedia diagrams, and eschews the ontological difference introduced between debris and representation. It also manages to suggest a world of possible uses in the material and habitual affordances of cards, without a page of explicit directions.

Deck is singular not just because it comes with no instructions, goals, or rules for play-which is equally true of toys and puzzles-but because Brecht uses all the tools at his disposal to embed a sense of a goal and a way of developing rules in the equipment of play itself. Playing with Deck is crucial to discovering these affordances. In my experience with Deck, there is a basic game that emerges and one that Brecht also seems to have played. In one interview, he describes using Deck in such a way that each player makes up rules "as they go along and then unmake[s] them...each player can criticize the other's rules, intervene, and change the rules." Brecht gives an example of one such rule, where "[e]veryone had to take three pictures from three cards and turn them into a joke, improvising." The invitation of the encyclopedic images and the chance structure of the cards allow Deck to make the transit from toy to puzzle to game, and back again. It gives the player a push and a hint, but does not give them a means or a map. It is rule-governed but without any rules, purposive without any purpose. Deck marks the most accomplished synthesis of Brecht's thinking about chance, instructions, and uncertainty.

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Featured image from George Brecht's "Ball Puzzle" (1964), label by G. Macunias.
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Peter McDonald is a PhD candidate in English Language & Literature at the University of Chicago. He received his MA from Simon Fraser University and his BA from the University of British Columbia. His current work is on the hermeneutics and aesthetic playfulness of 20th-Century anthropology and literary theory as applied to video games and new media.

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The Impossible Reversal: George Brecht's Playfulness in Deck: A Fluxgame

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George Brecht's Deck: A Fluxgame (1964) is a singular object, one that hovers between toy, game, and puzzle. It consists of playing cards printed with black-and-white images, collaged from encyclopedia drawings, diagrams, and photos. The subject matter is wide-ranging and comes from specialist domains: mechanics, optics, architecture, fluid dynamics, sport, etc.

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The use of the philosophy of chance in John Cage's work across mutiple disciplines.

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The use of the philosophy of chance in John Cage's work across mutiple disciplines.

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Cage's music, writing and visual art were inspired and organised by the philosophy of chance and (more especially) the disordering exercises that the little book prescribed.

The I Ching is both a devotional and a divinatory volume. The 64 images and interpretations that it contains were said to be derived from the practice of casting a turtle shell into a fire and drawing inferences from the cracks that appeared. In time, the patterns were schematised into 64 possibilities and the ritual condensed to the tossing of coins. Cage enthusiastically embraced this last practice and used it "every time I had a problem. I used it very often for practical matters, to write my articles and my music – for everything."

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In 1950 John Cage, who by the age of 38 had acquired some notoriety as a percussion composer and pioneer of the "prepared piano", was presented with a small book by his new composition student Christian Wolff. The precocious 16-year-old, later a noted composer and political activist, was the son of Kurt Wolff, the first publisher of (among others) Franz Kafka and August Sander, and the book in question his new pocket edition of an ancient Chinese text, the I Ching. Cage's interest in eastern philosophies was already established, though he was not and would never become a rigorous adherent of the Zen practices of chanting and meditation. Instead, what excited him about Wolff's gift was its capacity radically to alter his working methods - for the next four decades Cage's music, writing and visual art were inspired and organised by the philosophy of chance and (more especially) the disordering exercises that the little book prescribed.

The I Ching is both a devotional and a divinatory volume. The 64 images and interpretations that it contains were said to be derived from the practice of casting a turtle shell into a fire and drawing inferences from the cracks that appeared. In time, the patterns were schematised into 64 possibilities and the ritual condensed to the tossing of coins. Cage enthusiastically embraced this last practice and used it "every time I had a problem. I used it very often for practical matters, to write my articles and my music - for everything." Throughout 1951, he tossed coins to determine duration, pitch and dynamics for his Music of Changes. The following year, writing a piece of music that he had originally conceived as a "silent prayer", Cage excised everything but duration: the lengths of the three movements in his "silent" composition 4'33" were arrived at through the chance operations that were swiftly becoming central to his art.

Cage was not the first artist of his century to incorporate the random and indeterminate into his work. Tristan Tzara had recommended the cutting-up of newspaper stories and their reassembling as dadaist poems, while the surrealist conventions of collage and the exquisite corpse encouraged unpredictable associations between disparate images and texts. In the postwar period, such avant garde methods survived in the cut-up writings of William Burroughs and in the chaotic mythology, if not the actual composition, of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings. But all of this heroic (not to say rather macho) commitment to disorder was really quite remote from Cage's methods and temperament. His interest in chance was both cooler and more determined, a matter of submitting lightly, often humorously, to a new and impersonal discipline rather than sounding the depths of his wayward unconscious. His closest precursor in this regard was Marcel Duchamp, with whom he had become friends in the early 1940s. In 1913 Duchamp had collaborated with his sisters on a composition called Musical Erratum, the notes of which they had drawn from a hat. But even this playful scene was somehow too subjective, even Romantic, for Cage's tastes: "There are too many things that could happen that don't interest me, such as pieces of paper sticking together and the act of shaking the hat . . . I enjoy details and like things to be more complicated."

Cage's own recourse to chance operations became progressively less personal, less influenced by taste or motive. He first reduced the spiritually inflected I Ching to a simple processor of random numbers, and later abandoned the book and his coin-tossing in favour of a specially written computer program that produced long lists of random numbers between 1 and 64. From the 1980s until his death in 1992, Cage carried printouts of these lists around with him, using them to compose music, lectures and the mesostic poems (of a sort) that make up much of his late writings. On occasions, he maintained that these habits allowed him to move "away from ideas of order towards ideas of no order", but that claim seems misleading. He was more likely to assert that his use of chance was no embrace of chaos - Cage maintained, for example, a lifelong dislike of musical improvisation - but a way of asking new questions within certain set parameters. The prophet of chance was in fact one of the avant garde's strictest self-disciplinarians.

One can see this rigour at work and play in the drawings, prints and paintings that he produced in the last decade and a half of his life, and which form the core of John Cage: Every Day Is a Good Day, an exhibition of his visual art mounted by Hayward Touring and currently hosted by the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. In 1969, following Duchamp's death, Cage had collaborated on a lithographic tribute to his friend and mentor entitled Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel - the placing of the work's found text and images were decided by the composer's reservoir of random numbers. But it was in 1978 that Cage properly began to divine what it would mean to apply his compositional processes to visual art. He accepted an invitation from Kathan Brown, founder of Crown Point Press, a print workshop and publisher in San Francisco, to work with her skilled printers on a series of etchings. Cage returned nearly every year from then on, producing hundreds of prints and acquainting himself with various techniques, including engraving, drypoint and aquatint. At times, he pursued unorthodox methods to produce his marks, scorching the surface with burning newspaper and branding it with the hot base of a Japanese iron teapot.

At the heart of the work he produced at Crown Point is a series of prints and drawings inspired by the Ryoanji garden in Kyoto, Japan's most celebrated Zen garden, composed of 15 stones arranged in five mossy islands against a ground of raked gravel. Cage's prints and drawings, begun in 1983, required him to draw (first with a metal drypoint tool, later in pencil) around the perimeters of 15 stones whose positions on the etching plate or paper were determined by chance. In homage to the restricted space of the Japanese garden, and once more demonstrating his love of delimitation, Cage did not allow any of the stones to cross the edge of the plate, so that the resulting prints look chaotic and serene at the same time, the artist's line orbiting unpredictably within the rules. The drawings are more tentative and fragile, the pencilled ghosts of the stones sometimes barely insisting on the paper. Later, Cage extended his practice of drawing around stones at another print workshop at Mountain Lake, Virginia. Here, he painted in watercolour around larger stones taken from a river bed, using feathers for brushes and again producing unpredictable ellipses within a highly structured situation.

When he first engaged on his collaborative projects, Cage insisted he was neither a printmaker nor a painter. But he seems to have been unabashed about exhibiting the work that resulted, and keen to extend to the gallery walls the blithely impersonal principles that were at work in the drawings and prints. Towards the end of his life he worked on a number of exhibitions that showed his own and others' artworks in accordance with the chance operations that he employed in his music. The most prominent of these shows was Rolywholyover (the title is a portmanteau word from Finnegans Wake), an exhibition he devised with Julie Lazar, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Not only would the precise content and arrangement of the show be decided by chance, so that it became less an exhibition than a kind of "composition for museum", but periodically (as Cage put it) "the exhibition would change so much that if you came back a second time you wouldn't recognise it". Rolywholyover, which was eventually mounted at MoCA a year after the composer's death, was closer to a musical performance than a conventional exhibition - or, as Cage himself had it, something more like a circus than a gallery show.

The Baltic show is the first major retrospective of Cage's visual art, and it's a delight to see so much of the work in one room, to see Cage exploring techniques he had only just encountered or simply playing, in his rigorous way, with the rules he had devised for himself. But Every Day Is a Good Day is rather more than a survey of Cage's prints and drawings plus an appended archive of recordings and interviews. Instead, curator Jeremy Millar has tried to follow, and even extend, Cage's own vision of what an exhibition might be. Mostly, what one sees is determined by which works of Cage's were available, but how one sees it is partly a matter of Millar's invitation to the participating galleries to choose rules for their version of the show and then within that structure to give in to the vagaries of chance.

Take the placing of the pictures on the three walls of the Baltic's large main exhibition space. A notional grid organises the available wall space, while each work has been given a number. The gallery must determine by chance operations where each print or drawing is to be placed; if works clash, they must decide whether to hold one (or more) of them back in reserve or find a new position. The works, of course, are of different sizes, so there is then the question of where to place each with regard to its chosen square on the grid: it might be situated centrally, for instance, or with its top left corner at the top left corner of the square - it might even need another chance operation to decide from one of up to 19 possibilities. Once all of this has been concluded, there remains the matter of whether and how often the gallery is willing to change the entire arrangement (or maybe just part of it) in the course of the exhibition's run.

If the processes involved sound both devious and uncontrollable, the effect is curiously poetic. In its first iteration at the Baltic, the show looks faintly ghosted by the abstract grid that organises it, but sufficiently randomised so that the order is enigmatic. It helps that the high walls of the gallery put some of Cage's pictures tantalisingly too far away to be viewed clearly. (They may come down to earth when the show is randomly rearranged, and they might not.) And the whole is given a further Cagean inflection by Millar's decision to designate certain empty spaces as works by the artist; these too are part of the chance arrangement, as if the ghost of 4'33" were also in attendance, sounding noiselessly from the walls.

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Towards the end of his life, avant garde composer John Cage turned to visual art, using the same methods of random composition for his drawings and prints he used for his music. The results are strangely serene. By Brian Dillon

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“My favorite piece of music is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.”

In the early 1950s I began using chance operations to write my music, and after I became acquainted with the I Ching (The Chinese Book of Changes), I used it extensively. I apply chance operations to determine the frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration and placement of different elements in my music. The chance operations allow me to get away from the likes and dislikes of my ego so that I can become attentive to what is outside of my own psychology and memory. By using chance operations I am accepting what I obtain. Instead of expressing myself, I change myself. You might say I use chance operations instead of sitting meditation practice.

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John Cage and the Music of Sound - Inquiring Mind

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For the late composer John Cage, music was meditation, where he tried to “get rid of” his ego’s preferences and open to the flow of experience.

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A typography based board game which incorporates chance.

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A typography based board game which incorporates chance.

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The blue and white blocks are designed to be moved around into any number of scenarios “to scribble, write, draw, create patterns, build, and invent,” says Felix Salut

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Amsterdam-based designer studio Felix Salut has reimagined their building block board game, the Galapagos Game, into a pocket version comprising 54 building blocks with nine geometric shapes that you can configure into an infinite array of letters, words, or something more abstract.

The blue and white blocks are designed to be moved around into any number of scenarios "to scribble, write, draw, create patterns, build, and invent," says Felix Salut. Leave your roommate or spouse a note or challenge your kids to spell out their name creatively - the options are only limited to your imagination.

The original Galapagos Game was so popular that the Stedelijk Museum added it to the permanent collection and it's since become an award-winning typeface and app, so no doubt the pocket version will be a big hit also.

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Galapagos Game: A Typography-Influenced Board Game by Felix Salut

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Felix Salut has reimagined their building block board game, the Galapagos Game, into a pocket version comprising 54 building blocks with nine geometric shapes that you can configure into an infinite array of letters, words, or something more abstract.

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Research on how to go about making a card game.

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Research on how to go about making a card game.

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Some helpful stuff from this article:

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Card games are a long-standing form of entertainment, whether one plays the western game of poker, the eastern game of Hanafuda, or the global game of Yu-Gi-Oh. Played worldwide by millions of users, card games have ingrained themselves into our media and culture. But how are these games made? Do you start with a theme, similar to how Hanafuda was designed, with the artworks of flowers and the seasons taken into consideration? Or do you start with a mechanic like Yu-gi-oh, which uses multiple decks and a zoned playing field? Let us figure this out together, and go through the steps of constructing a card game.
Research Phase
The first step of designing a card game is researching existing ones, which will provide you with invaluable information on how and what to design, by allowing you to cater to the likes and interests of players.

For the card game that I designed, the research phase took around 6 months. In this process, I played trading card games such as Magic The Gathering (one of the oldest TCGs with one of the biggest player bases), digital CCGs like Legends of Runeterra (a digital collectible card game made by Riot Games), as well as tabletop card games, including Terraform Mars and Love Letters. By playing these games, I was able to get a grasp of how these card games are different from each other. In this phase, I also looked at how specific games have evolved over the ages and the many problems that players have had with the current iterations of these card games. This method follows the players and allows you to understand what people truly want to play.

A more scholarly version of this process would entail reading game design books and game design blogs. Great examples of game design books and blogs include The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell, Mark Rosewater's , Making Magic , and Hearthstone design team's articles. These articles and books often bring you tried-and-true methods regarding game design. Whether it is the bottom-up card design used by the Magic the Gathering design team, which entails a design philosophy of balance/mechanics first and flavor second, or Hearthstone's unique class identity model, these sources will always bring you some tidbits of wisdom. However, this process does focus on the developer's insight and what they have at the end, rather than the exact wishes of the card gaming community.

Another way to get through this stage is by watching game designers' interviews and presentations. This method includes watching web series such as Extra Credits, a YouTube web series that dissects game design, and Escapist's , which follows a game maker's journey in creating a game. GDC's creator presentations, such as Twenty Years, Twenty Lessons Learned , which explores the many lessons that a game designer went through in his 20 years of designing card games, also works as a great source of information for design philosophies and guidelines. This approach is often the most direct, as it shows you the developer's process and what you need to know in order to progress with your designs.

All of these methods are very distinct and work for different people, but sometimes it takes a mix of all three forms of study, in order to understand what you are making and how it all comes together. Then, when it all said and done, you can move on to the next phase, that of conceptualization.
Conceptualization Phase
Now, we reach the hardest and most important phase of card game development, the conceptualization phase. In this phase, the discussion transitions from the accomplishments of others to the accomplishments that you yourself will attempt. Some things that need to be done include designing the basic mechanics of the game, the set-up / rules, as well as creating the complex core game mechanics of health totals, resource counters, playing fields, and card types.

For the first step of the conceptualization stage, you should invariably know your target audience. You need to determine who the game is for and create game mechanic complexity in order to match your demographic. For my game, I chose to pander to a younger demographic that would encompass both teens and young adults. This would mean that the base mechanics of the game would require a more complex, but not overbearing, tutorial, introductory phase, and a common theme that would resonate with the intended age group.

In my interviews with the Tabletop Club, I found out that this type of simple complexity often draws people in. "It really depends," said Justin Cheng '23. "For me, it brings me in. The only case where it does repel me is when it uses a paragraph of text or when it does get to a point where it's just complex for the sake of being complex." Cheng's enjoyment of complexity comes from forming strategies that are interesting and complex without being hassled by paragraphs of text.

However, if you have a younger audience, you may want a simpler set of mechanics that could be picked up and played. For instance, Candy Land and Trouble are board games made for children with rules so simple that anyone can pick the game up and play. In comparison, if you have an older audience, you can often explore darker themes, more complex strategies, and more levels of play. Examples would include games such as Warhammer 40k and Chess.

The second step is to design the game mechanics, such as battlefields and game pieces. This step is very important. In a poll that surveyed members from the Tabletop Club and the Esports Club - Bronx Science's premier club for playing games, statistics showed that 73% of the participants placed game design and game mechanics as the primary reason they play games. In my particular case, I chose to create an army builder-style card game that used three types of different resources (Mana, Gold, Energy), three different card types (Units, Spells, Technology), and a diamond-shaped battlefield. However, in your game, you can choose to not have a battlefield or a resource mechanic.

The final step is the numbers and more technical part of the design, focusing more on how the game is played, the goals, and the rules. In a complex game, rules may span books, or maybe the entire game, with abstract goals and 'how to play' instructions that are left for the players to decide. An example of this would be Dungeons and Dragons, where the entire game is based on two rule books. However, in a more simple game, there are usually defined rules that are integral for the game to progress. Winning in these simple games is often more clearly defined; for example, your goal might be to "fulfill x condition" or "reduce the opponent to 0 health." For the game I made, I chose to define the win condition as "reduce the opponent to 0 health or fulfill a condition on a card," and piggybacked off of the basic rules of Magic the Gathering as a template for design.

With that, we have a functional template for a game composed of rules, a theme, and a set of mechanics. Now, we can finally start designing cards.
Design Phase
Now that we have a concept for how the game functions and a grasp on the mechanics of the game, it is time to start formatting and designing the cards. In the design phase, you create the thematics, the cards, and the battlefield.

The first step in creating a card is to determine how you are going to create the card. This may sound redundant, but the point is to choose whether you are going to design your first cards around flavor (top-down design method) or unique mechanics (bottom-up design method). Both of these are valid design methods, but it is all based on personal taste. I used the bottom-up design method in my game. While talking with the Tabletop Club, many members stated that mechanics were essential towards explaining why people played card games, but that interesting themes also played a big role in why they pick them up. In an interview, Jacob Rubakha '22 noted, "Sometimes it would make sense to start with the theme you are trying to build a game for and then think about the mechanics, while sometimes you might come up with a specific mechanic that seems very fun and start with that, followed by trying to encompass that in a theme." In my case, I had an interesting mechanic for my first card.

Now, the second step is to create cards in spreadsheets. Now, this may not seem particularly fun, but spreadsheets are often the best tool for card creation; they allow you to list card names, card texts, costs, descriptions, and flavor texts right next to each other. This way, you can create a lot of cards in a condensed space without the need to create a file for each card. If you are creating a more complex card game, you may want to split your spreadsheet into multiple spreadsheets separated by card type, since it would clear out space for you to design each card.

In this design process, remember to make interesting mechanics for the cards and determine how much flavor is in each card. In card games, the flavor is the card's theme. An example would be a bird card having a flight-like ability or an archer having a ranged attack. Having an appropriate amount of flavor makes the game more enjoyable and immersive for the player. However, never throw balance to the wayside for the sake of flavor. "Flavor is important, as it keeps people interested in the story and lore, and it keeps continuity and allows things to make sense. But it should never cause balance issues," said Fiona Zhou '23.

The third step is to create a card template using a drawing application. Creating a card template should follow a few basic rules:

Rule One: The key parts of the card should stand out. This means that the name of the card, the effects of the card, and the cost of activating or playing the card should be distinct and never obstructed.

Rule Two: The color should differentiate the cards. Color is great for card artworks and maybe unique foiling, but the color is key in helping differentiate how the card looks. A great example of this is seen in Magic the Gathering where the five main colors - White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green - are emphasized on cards of the corresponding color.

Finally, Rule Three: Keep the card clean and simple. There may be temptations to splash colorful arrays onto the card in order to make everything look pretty, but as noted previously, when you do this, you are going to obstruct the player's ability to discern the cards. In the case of the example game, I created this basic template using a GNU Image Manipulation Program that corresponds a color to an aspect of the card. However, in simpler card games, you only really need to follow rules one and two. They usually have less information to convey and are more theme-based; in those cases, the visual style of the card is key.

The final step is transferring your spreadsheet data to the card template. This process is usually quite arduous and time-consuming since you are not doing anything new. It merely combines the products of the previous two steps and creates something new. However, the key in this step is to make sizes proportional to standard card sizes to allow them to fit into sleeves, as well as putting in placeholder artwork for the cards to save time. In this phase, all we are going to do is create a prototype. Once you have the cards created, the only thing left to do is to print them on any old piece of cardstock, leaving you with a playable version of your card game. Now, with all of that complete, it is time to test and fix issues.
Test Phase
There is now a functional prototype of the game, and when there is a prototype, there is testing to be done. In the testing phase, the primary goal is to check the game for imbalances, quirks, and the general level of fun.

To do this, you may want to first print out your cards and play with your close friends and family. Let them construct their decks using the cards you have created and play several games with them. The purpose of this step is not to check for issues or balancing mistakes but rather to check for the reactions of the players. The goal here is to make sure that the players are enjoying the game, while maintaining interest for an extended amount of time. Testing for fun is important because it allows you to see whether the game provokes reactions such as joy, excitement, nervousness; those emotions are often indicative of a game being intense, fun, and enjoyable.

Then, when you finish testing it with friends, try playing against yourself and find overpowered or game-breaking combinations with the cards you have created. This process allows you to check for the combinations that would make the game dull or unplayable. This is also the step where you balance the card game and create common phrasing for cards to allow logical and easier interpretation of the card text. It entails rewriting card effects to make them consistent with one another, choosing specific words to represent certain things, or using keywords to symbolize a certain effect that may be wordy.

The final step in the testing phase is the tournament test where you get eight players, teach them how to play, and then let them create their decks. After that, let those players compete in a small tournament. This allows you to see the meta, or most effective, tactic available and whether they stifle creativity or design space for the players. This is the most important process because, for many players, the ability to create and find innovative ways to make decks is one of the reasons that they play card games. "What really keeps me in was the uniqueness of the gameplay," said Justin Cheng '23. "The ability to create unique strategies from the combination of cards and that you're always in unique situations is admirable." This shows that unique experiences in gameplay and variety are often what people want. Therefore, if there is a determined meta in your card game, it can create a situation where the game stagnates.
Polish Phase
Once testing is finished, it is time to polish, print, and publish the game. In the polishing phase, you should be fixing the mistakes that you found in the testing phase, replacing the placeholder art from the design phase, as well as changing core mechanics designed in the conceptualization phase as needed.

For my game, I replaced card art that does not seem to fit with the game's aesthetic, changed card names and text in order to make them more balanced and thematic, and removed parts of the game's core mechanic. For more complex games, this step would often take more time, as when you change one mechanic in your game, you will then need to restructure your game to make sure that it still holds ground.

Now, once you have finished with this task, you will need to start the printing process. If you are printing the game for your friends, you are going to want to use cardstock, which is sturdy and thick paper, in order to print your cards. You will also need card gloss in order to prevent the cards from scratching or denting after consistent play. However, if you are looking to mass-produce these cards for distribution, it would be more sustainable to pay a local printing shop to do it for you. For my game, I created my cards using cardstock and gloss, allowing me to play this game with my family and friends.

With all of the steps above now completed, you now have a card game that you can play with your friends. You can continue developing it by creating your own expansion packs and engaging with the community. Or, you can work on another card game with another theme and another style. But regardless of your choice, you can always come back to this article and use it as a guide to design your next project.

The first step in creating a card is to determine how you're going to create the card.

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Blank Cards: How Do You Create a Card Game From Scratch?

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Card games are a long-standing form of entertainment, whether one plays the western game of poker, the eastern game of Hanafuda, or the global game of Yu-Gi-Oh. Played worldwide by millions of users, card games have ingrained themselves into our media and culture. But how are these games made?

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The importance of Chance and interactivity in creativity.

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The importance of Chance and interactivity in creativity.

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Chance has a privileged role in creativity. It can be used to thwart bias, overcome the drive to imitate past solutions, and stimulate new ideas.

Interactive thinkers reach solutions faster than individuals thinking on their own because external processes perform some of the work that otherwise would be performed internally.

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Research on the relevance of free association in creativity.

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Research on the relevance of free association in creativity.

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Free Association and Ego Function in Creativity: A Study of Content and Form in Art on JSTOR

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Jacques Schnier, Free Association and Ego Function in Creativity: A Study of Content and Form in Art, American Imago, Vol. 17, No. 1 (SPRING 1960), pp. 61-74

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Product description

This is a tool for helping us focus on what we need to be fulfilled so that we can direct our energies and thoughts most effectively.
It can be hard to decide what we really want to achieve in our lives; our ambitions are often scattered, diverse and difficult to pin down.

This is a tool for helping us focus on what we need to be fulfilled so that we can direct our energies and thoughts most effectively. It contains 160 cards detailing our most common ambitions and longings, along with instructions on how to reflect on our goals, arrange them in a logical order of priorities and, where necessary, weigh up trade-offs. Using the cards will help us to reveal our true purpose. The cards can be displayed, photographed or kept close to hand as a reminder of the path ahead.

This is a simple-seeming but ingenious psychological tool for converting hunches and dreams into a realisable future.
160 cards + 20 page booklet | 159 x 118 x 21mm |

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What Do I Really Want To Achieve? - Card Set | The School of Life

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This is a tool for helping us focus on what we need to be fulfilled so that we can direct our energies and thoughts most effectively.

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Behavioural Design is all about creating the right environment for people to make a decision or take action towards their goals. It can be applied to encourage a desired behaviour, to stop unwanted behaviours as well as to form habitual routines.

Behavioural design is often referred to the concept of nudging, which " proposes positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions as ways to influence the behaviour and decision making of groups or individuals" ( thanks Wikipedia). The term was coined by Richard Thaler who built on the "fast and slow thinking" theories of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, and introduced nudging to public policy. Proving the positive effects of applying behavioural economics in practice got him a well-deserved Nobel Prize in 2017. So with all these Nobel recognitions the field of behavioural economics is getting more traction and gaining importance in the design field.

To me, behavioural design is a combination of the design process and behavioural economics. Design is a creative, generative, explorative approach to problem-solving - it's the crafty cool kid on the block. Behavioural economics is the nerdy one - scientific, measurable, analysing how people make decisions. The two don't play together easily, but when they do - great things can happen.

The role of the design process is to explore the whole user experience and go wide on the end-to-end journey, while behavioural economics zooms in on the specific moments of decision making and applies small nudges strategically to cause a big impact. That's why behavioural design can also be very well applied to the human-centred design process to make products and services more intuitive, effective, and easy to use.

Back to Hyper... What did the workshop cover

Everything at Hyper Island is hands-on, fast-paced and real-world ready so we translated all theory into a practical 101 talk and a workshop applicable to the briefs that the students are currently working on.

The first step of the process is to do explorative research to understand exactly what people do in context. It is best to combine different research methods to get the complete picture.

Unlike traditional economic theories based on the idea that humans always act in their best interest, behavioural economics argues that people don't make rational choices and are influenced by their environment, social norms, and an array of cognitive biases.

While doing the research it is important to capture all factors affecting the user's decision making - apart from individual cognitive biases, people are massively affected by their surroundings in terms of how choices are framed and what is visible to them at any given time. As social animals, humans are evolutionary conditioned to behave in accordance with tribe norms and to do what others are doing - particularly role models of authority and liking.

Tools

Considering all these factors we can synthesise our knowledge about users by using the behavioural persona tool. While traditional personas represent one fictional ideal customer to target, behavioural personas are based on real people involved in the service and focus on what they do, how they do it and why. I wrote more about them here.

The journey map is the tool to synthesise our understanding of the context of the persona and visualise their current experience regardless of the service or product they use. There is no one way to do journey mapping, and it makes sense to adapt the format for each project. The basic structure consists of the steps users take and the touch points plotted on a timeline. For behavioural design, it is helpful to illustrate each step as a job story to clarify what users need to get done and what outcome they are seeking to get out of it.

By having the holistic view of the context, you can identify behavioural principles that explain the current decisions and the ones to help you ideate how to nudge your persona towards a desired action. A great tool for this is the Persuasive Patterns deck of cards to plot applicable principles against the journey map. The selected patterns are very relevant to product and service design . To learn more about the plethora of cognitive biases and how to play with them - a good starting point is thе awesome cheatsheet by Buster Benson.

Once you've identified some opportunities, you can define the ideal future state - capture it with a "How Might We" design challenge and introduce a new job story with the intended behaviour and envisioned outcomes.

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How to apply behavioural economics to the design process

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Behavioural Design is all about creating the right environment for people to make a decision or take action towards their goals. It can be applied to encourage a desired behaviour, to stop unwanted...

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A Unique Card Game That Can Help You Make Art

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Singapore based agency Do Not Design has created the design for Making Art, a card game that is intended to be used for a unique purpose.

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Biomimicry in design is a really good example of the use of lateral thinking and cross-pollination to produce innovative ideas.

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Random Stimulus technique to inspire creativity,

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Random Stimulus technique to inspire creativity,

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Posted in Blog, Create, Design Thinking, Facilitation by Jo North

Random Stimulus Creativity Technique for Brainstorms & Innovation

As business problems evolve in complexity, generating original creative ideas for innovative solutions can be quite challenging. One popular creative technique to bypass this hurdle and instigate new ideas is the 'random stimulus' method. This powerful technique, inspired by Edward de Bono's lateral thinking concept, aids in addressing the creative block that often creeps in during brainstorming sessions.

Our brains often take the well-trodden path of least resistance. They do like to be comfortable, which is lovely and cosy for us (and them!), but doesn't help us if our thinking is stuck.

Having a deep, directional train of thought can be brilliant if we feel we are on the right track and have cracked whatever it is we are working on. Sometimes though it can feel unsatisfactory when we know that what has got us here will not get us there. We need to reduce our left brain attention and trigger our right brain into action.

At these times, we need something disruptive to overcome our 'stucks'. This is where the random stimulus creativity technique comes in handy.

What is the Random Stimulus Creativity Technique?

The random stimulus technique is a simple but effective tool for creative thinking. This method encourages the generation of new ideas and solutions by introducing an unrelated thing or 'random input' into a brainstorming session. The input could be in the following forms: a random word, a random object, a random picture, or a random page from a book. The first step is to understand and explore the full meaning of the word or to delve into the essence of the object or picture.

A key advantage of this method is that it enables easier access to a wealth of information from the subconscious mind. This technique allows for the formation of new associations and promotes lateral thinking.

Bunches of Bananas

The random stimulus creativity technique is an adaptation of Tudor Rikards' bunches of bananas creativity technique.

'Bunches of bananas' is a metaphor for introducing a somewhat random theme or topic into discussions to unblock and stimulate new thoughts. The name 'bunches of bananas' is just because it's pretty random. I think it also reminds me of how monkeys' attention shifts as soon as bananas appear on the scene, but that's a personal view!

This is how to use bunches of bananas as an unsticker in a meeting. In some ways it's similar to how people often use humour to lighten tension or reduce pressure in groups.

1. Observe the mood and nature of the discussions. Are people locked into one way of thinking? Do they seem stuck?

2. Think about what you might do or say to unstick the group. Create 'bunches of bananas' that match your personality and style.

3. Just as it matters how you deliver the punchline of a joke for it to work, your delivery of your 'bunches of bananas' also needs to have the right timing and tone and have the best effect.

4. Remember that in many ways the content of the disruption usually doesn't matter. What is important is the act of disruption.

You can see an example of how 'bunches of bananas' works in action here.

How to Apply the Random Stimulus Technique

Here's how to apply the random stimulus technique in your brainstorming sessions and creative problem solving workshops.

First, ask the team to choose a random stimulus. The choice should be entirely unrelated to your business problem. Select a random word from a book, or online via Google checks or Google Books. For a random picture or object, everyday items can provide a new look at your problem.

If the weather is fine, I ask people to go outside to find and bring back something interesting.

Next, allow each team member to delve into the full meaning of each random word, object or picture. This process is not about making an obvious relationship but more about creating new ways of thinking about your problem. Edward de Bono referred to this as 'random word stimulation' or 'random word technique'.

The human memory operates on laws of association. The random stimuli can act as a sense trigger. It often leads the subconscious mind towards a good solution or new direction. The aim is to stimulate a random thought that acts as the seed of a new idea.

Once the process generates a collection of ideas, the next step is idea selection. Shortlist the best ideas, based on their potential to provide a creative solution to the original problem.

Benefit of Regular Practice

Just as with all creative skills, the random stimulus creativity technique benefits from regular practice. This could help in discovering new inventions or new products and helps refine your creative problem-solving abilities. It could be the key to unlocking new associations or providing a fresh perspective, bringing a sense of things that you might have overlooked.

The random stimulus technique is also great for generating disruptive solutions. It can lead to some groundbreaking ideas coming from the most unexpected sources. Whether it's a new word, a short sentence, a different page from Google Books, or your own feelings about a favorite feature, these unrelated elements could offer a deeper insight into your business problem.

Relevance in Modern Day Problem Solving

In an era of unprecedented information overload and online content, the random stimulus technique is a unique way to use this wealth of information to our advantage. By randomly selecting stimuli, one can uncover new ways of approaching business problems, thereby ensuring the generation of original ideas.

Notably, this type of subject is particularly useful in brainstorming meetings where a team is facing a creative block. It can trigger a fresh sense of original problem understanding, leading to good solutions, new product ideas, and creative solutions to business challenges.

The next time you're in a brainstorming meeting, try the random stimulus technique. This method might be the key to tapping into your team's creative skills and thinking abilities. It's creative disruption could offer the new direction your team needs. Remember, as per Milo Bono's interpretation of his father's work, "The best ideas come from the most unlikely sources."

How to Use the Random Stimulus Creativity Technique in Your Solo Brainstorm

I suppose that I am like lots of people in that sometimes I need to generate ideas on my own. This is due to things like the nature of the task, when or where I'm working. It can be easier to get into a stuck at these times. There is no-one else to inspire other approaches. So, I will deliberately disrupt my own thinking by jotting down the most random solution or thought I can.

I was working on ideas for blogs and social media and thought I was coming up with pretty similar themes. So, I wrote down the most unrelated words I thought of in the moment, which were 'broccoli pants'. I'm not sure why, it just shows the sophistication of my inner mind I suppose! 😊

Just this small act of disruption sparked new trains of thought and I came up with some very different ideas. Including this post about 'random stimulus'. Ideas is a numbers game, and they all don't have to be good to be useful! The not-so-good ideas are stepping stones to something better.

I hope that you have fun and some great results from using the random stimulus creativity technique. I'd love to hear how to get on!

And if you enjoyed this article, you might also like to try the SCAMPER brainstorming technique here.

Get in Touch

Please contact us to get in touch about facilitating your workshops!

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Random Stimulus Creativity Technique for Brainstorms & Innovation

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Random Stimulus Creativity Technique for Brainstorms & Innovation As business problems evolve in complexity, generating original creative ideas for

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Key points

Absurdism questions us, on a philosophical level, about what the point of it all is.

Absurdism accepts that there is no underlying meaning and empowers the individual to create their own meaning.

An "It is what it is" mantra for coping with worry and stress might be useful, but it may not be easy.

In a recent post, I discussed the old saying "It is what it is" as a useful adage that could serve us well as a cognitive frame for how we engage worry. I received a lot of interesting feedback, much of which reminded me of absurdist philosophy. I thought it worthwhile to dive deeper into a consideration of absurdism in this context.

Absurdism

I recall first coming across the concept of absurdism as a genre in literature, during my undergraduate days. In a class on 20th-century drama studies, we covered the "Theatre of the Absurd" (Esslin, 1961) and the approaches many writers took to convey meaning-arguably, lack of meaning. Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in particular, stuck with me. In fairness, not much happens in the two-act play, leading some critics back in the 1950s to refer to it as boring -as a play in which nothing happens-twice. For me, the play was-and remains-greatly intriguing. When performed right, there is an underlying vibe of dread, despair, and uncertainty throughout it, as the minimal cast waits in vain for the titular Godot. So, what makes it absurd? We'll get back to that in a moment.

Upon my budding interest in the genre, I engaged more narratives and read more theory, eventually arriving at the work of Albert Camus. Though I had been previously aware of his literary work, I had never looked at it from a truly philosophical scope. So, I read him again, from an absurdist perspective, and I began to better understand the points being made-in an existence, arguably, where such points don't matter.

Arguably, Camus' most famous contribution is his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, in which the titular Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a large hill for all eternity. As Sisyphus gets to the top each time, inevitably, the boulder falls down the other side and he must start over. Sounds like a crummy existence, right? The sad truth is that the analogy is made in reference to our own existences. Every day you get up, eat breakfast, go to work, get stuck in traffic, eat again, sleep, and do more or less the same things until you realise the monotony of it all. Then you evaluate the importance of your daily activities and question the point of it all (e.g., work, romance, hobbies). Shouldn't there be something more to it? Shouldn't there be more than simply existing, just waiting-like, for Godot? (See, I told you I'd get back to it.)

It's kind of absurd, the way we live, isn't it? Think about it: the uncertainty associated with life-pandemics, terrorist attacks, car accidents, allergic reactions, wars over beliefs about how individuals should live their lives, wars over access to harvesting millions-years-old dead animals that heat our homes and make our cars go-and tinned sardines. All of it is absurd.

Creating Meaning

Sure, absurdism questions us, on a philosophical level, about what's the point of it all-and sure, it posits that there is no underlying meaning. But it's not all doom and gloom like many nihilist perspectives. Instead, it accepts that there is no underlying meaning and empowers the individual to stand up against the absurdity of existence and create their own meaning: "We must imagine Sisyphus happy."

I have always found this perspective particularly comforting. That's why I bring it up-because there's quite a bit of overlap with what we were recently discussing regarding "It is what it is." We cannot control everything in the world. Again, there are things you can do or control-so, do so. Be proactive. On the other hand, there are things we have no control over-the universe's indifference toward us, exhibited through the random nature of events occurring around us will yield things we can do nothing about. Why dwell on the things we cannot change? It is what it is.

This notion of absurdism doubles as a reinforcing foundation for a perspective presented on this page a while back, regarding thoughts on legacy and "meanings" of life. Specifically, if we look at Sisyphus not as the victim of a tragic fate, but rather as a man who "enjoys" his work, despite his absurd existence, then perhaps this isn't such a negative outlook on our existence or potential lack of meaning. Again, we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Akin to our previously discussed mantra regarding "It is what it is," we must shift our attention from the negatives we can do nothing about to the attainment or experience of things that we value.

Moreover, we discussed that from an objective, biological position, we must consider that our purpose is simply to exist and propagate as we can, and, once we pass, that purpose has ended. But if we consider the sustainability of our existence-even after we're gone-and recognise that we have the ability to change things for future generations, just as a result of being here, does that not suffice as meaning?

In conclusion, an "It is what it is" mantra for coping with worry and stress might be a useful approach; but, consistent with many cognitive reframing strategies, it may not be easy. However, what might facilitate this is the consideration of absurdist philosophy and meaning-building. I'm not saying you should subscribe to such an outlook, but consideration of its related perspectives might facilitate a means for more clearly identifying the things we value in an uncertain world and working toward such endeavours, while accepting the things we can do nothing about instead of unnecessarily dwelling on them. Notably, Beckett was never one for explaining his work, but one of his "deeper" descriptions of Waiting for Godot was that all that mattered were "the laughter and the tears."

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Absurdism and Coping: A Follow-Up on "It Is What It Is"

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Critically thinking about mental well-being in the 21st century.

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Feeling “empty” can be a frightening and painful experience. When we feel emotional emptiness, we feel hollow–like there is simply nothing inside of us.

This feeling can be destabilizing as we feel disconnected from ourselves and others and therefore unsure of how to navigate our experience in the world.

In these cases, we will often do anything we can to feel something. We might take drugs, eat unhealthy foods, engage in cutting or risky sexual relationships–anything to feel something.

That disconnect between seemingly enjoyable activities and our lack of enjoyment can be experienced as emptiness.

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Feeling "empty" can be a frightening and painful experience. When we feel emotional emptiness, we feel hollow-like there is simply nothing inside of us.

This feeling can be very different from the "heavy" and overwhelming feelings of depression, panic, or anger, which weigh us down because they seem to permeate every aspect of our being. Emotional emptiness is more of an uncomfortable lightness where we feel untethered. This feeling can be destabilizing as we feel disconnected from ourselves and others and therefore unsure of how to navigate our experience in the world.

What can make us feel even more unsettled when we feel empty is that we may blame ourselves for our emptiness. We see other people seeming to feel more "full"-connected to themselves and others-and it seems like a rich and satisfying existence.

We may even recall times when we didn't feel so empty and wish we could return to those times. We curse ourselves and ask, "What is wrong with us?"

In these cases, we will often do anything we can to feel something. We might take drugs, eat unhealthy foods, engage in cutting or risky sexual relationships-anything to feel something.

To be sure, there are situations in which our emptiness is an indication that there is something "wrong." We may have a biological predisposition to experience specific mental illnesses that leave us vulnerable to feelings of emptiness. For example, when we struggle with mood disorders, we often have an inability to experience pleasure.

That disconnect between seemingly enjoyable activities and our lack of enjoyment can be experienced as emptiness. Or, if we struggle with panic disorder, we can experience a sense of numbness that feels like emptiness. And one of the defining features of borderline personality disorder is a chronic sense of emptiness, as well as an associated unstable sense of self. Using biological and skills-based treatments to treat these underlying mental health issues can be very valuable in addressing feelings of emptiness.

But sometimes, we feel empty for a different reason. We feel empty not because there is something "wrong" with us per se but because there is something "right" with us. We are truly not connecting with the environment around us because that environment is somehow toxic and not consistent with our purpose and our life goals.

This toxicity could be for several reasons. Perhaps the things we love and want in our lives are simply unavailable in the current environment-such as when we are isolated socially or do not have access to doing the things we love. Or it could be when we are experiencing harmful or abusive behavior from others that we cannot immediately escape. And our emptiness is our mind and body refusing to connect to the toxic environment and holding a space for something different-something better.

In this case, emptiness may represent an openness -a willingness and ability to learn and experience new and exciting connections. This conceptualization of emptiness is more consistent with Zen Buddhist philosophies that encourage us to "empty our cup" as a way to truly connect with ourselves and the world around us. In this model, our hollowness or untethered feeling would be understood as an opportunity rather than a disconnect.

I have been thinking a lot about this issue since talking with Ann Wilson of the band Heart about her career and new solo album, Fierce Bliss. In our conversation, we discussed how toxic environments often exist in which other people judge our goals and aspirations, often critically and negatively. This experience can often leave us empty, even questioning our connection to our productive, creative, or artistic work.

But Wilson discussed how she came to view feelings of emptiness as a possible opportunity rather than a problem per se. Based in part on the conversation with Wilson, here are a few tips that people can use to cope with feelings of emptiness:

Our first step in coping with feelings of emptiness is to accept rather than avoid the experience. This approach begins a healthy pattern of listening to our bodies rather than suppressing our experiences through unhealthy behaviors. We can accept our experience of emptiness through several different methods, including mindfulness meditation or simply writing down how we are feeling. Regardless of the specific method, it is optimal if we focus on the physical experience of emptiness.

Environment Essential Reads

Is emptiness something we feel in our entire bodies, or is it localized to our head, heart, or stomach? Does it feel painful? Do we feel more agitated or slowed down? Whatever the feeling, the more we can observe the somatic sensations of emptiness, the more we can become aware of and comfortable with the experience.

Second, once we begin to connect with our emptiness, we can take the next step of trying to understand our emptiness. Why do we feel empty? In doing so, we take the approach that our emptiness is part of an ongoing learning, development, and growth process. We view the emptiness as a messenger-something is not sitting right with us, and we want to understand it.

In order to achieve this task, it can often be helpful to either write down in a narrative format the "story" of why we feel empty. What past experiences are relevant? Have we had any recent losses or disappointments that might make us feel disconnected from our lives? Is an existing job or relationship not fulfilling? This may also be when we consider whether we have a biological or mental health condition that leaves us predisposed to feeling empty.

Whatever the possible hypotheses, the important thing is that the explanation feels authentic and "real." This challenges the notion that our emptiness is something wrong with us and begins a process by which it is a pathway to how we can feel more connected to ourselves.

Third, based on the connections we make between our sense of emptiness and our thoughts, behaviors, and life experiences, we can begin to consider specific coping strategies to feel less empty. For example, we may discover that whenever we feel empty, exercise makes us feel more whole and connected to ourselves.

Or perhaps engaging in some form of creative process such as listening to or performing music. Some of us tend to feel less empty simply when we talk with someone with whom we feel close. In other cases, we may not feel less empty until we resolve a conflict or end a toxic relationship. When examining options, it is important to consider as many possible coping strategies as we can so we can choose from a wide menu of potentially helpful tools.

Next, we can experiment with different strategies that might help us transition from feeling empty to feeling more "whole." We try different strategies and see if and how they work. For example, we may decide that the combination of exercise, eating a healthy meal, and getting a good night's sleep, followed by connecting with someone close to us the next day, is a reliable combination.

For others, writing in our journal may work the best. Regardless of which strategies work for a given situation, the key is to continually engage in the ongoing process of seeing our emptiness as part of a coping and potentially healing process.

Finally, once we explore, understand, and cope with our emptiness, we can begin to use this information to develop a proactive lifestyle plan to help prevent feeling empty in the future. We can start seeking out situations that tend to make us feel whole. Simultaneously, we may start to learn how to avoid situations that we predict down the road will make us feel more empty.

So, for example, exercising to cope with emptiness can become a more proactive and consistent exercise plan. Seeking out friends with whom we can connect when we feel empty might help us see who we want to spend more time with moving forward. Listening to music to feel better can begin a dedication to seeking and supporting artists to whom we most connect.

So, if we embrace our emptiness, we can begin a process by which we not only feel more fulfilled but engage in an ongoing process of building a lifetime of feeling "whole."

Listen to Dr. Mike's conversation with Ann Wilson here.

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The key to successful public engagement with your research is planning: it is important to think about why you want to engage and who you want to engage before deciding how you're going to do it. This guide is a quick overview of some of the key considerations to help shape your plans for public engagement.

For researchers at the University of Bath, engaging public groups with their research tends to serve three purposes:

to inform and inspire others: researchers informing and inspiring a variety of different public groups with their research

to listen to others: researchers receiving views, insights and perspectives from public groups about their research

to collaborate with others: whereby researchers and the public work together on particular projects or help define future research direction, policy or implementation of research outcomes

Most public engagement with research activities will include a combination of these types of interactions.

It is important to remember that public engagement needs to be a two-way process which will result in mutual benefit - for you or your research and your participants. This mutual benefit can take many forms - it can be as straightforward as developing a skill, having the opportunity to meet people, or experiencing something new. The two-way process it involves may be in real-time or it may take place over time.

Reasons and personal motivations for engagement will vary dependent on research areas. Our Engaged Researcher case studies show examples of why researchers at the University have engaged public groups with their work and how they and their research have benefited from engagement activity.

Understanding your reasons to engage

Public Engagement Onion

The Public Engagement Onion is a model of thinking about your public engagement activities. The closer your activity is to the 'core' of the model the more impact engagment has on your research moving from telling or information giving on the outside to two-way dialogue and co-design.

Public Engagement Triangle

The Public Engagement Triangle is a tool that outlines the different public engagement activities under three key purposes outlined above. The purpose of this triangle is to show that all three have value, and your engagement work will probably fall somewhere in the middle of the three.

People differ in many ways, such as their interests, affiliations, background, age, economic circumstances, location and gender. Who you want to reach will depend on the nature of your research and the reasons for the engagement. High-quality public engagement with research activities have a clear and specific demographic in mind - rather than the 'general public'.

Once you have identified who want to engage, the best way of reaching out maybe through a partnership with another organisation such as voluntary sector organisations and charities, museums and galleries, schools or festivals that already works with or has access to your identified audience. The Public Engagement Unit have a number of partnerships in Bath and wider across the South West, get in touch with us if you have would like help with forming a partnership.

Thinking about who you want to engage

When thinking about who you might want to engage with your research, the following might be helpful considerations:

public engagement should enrich or enhance your research and should not be essential to it

work with an audience you feel you already know a little about

put yourself in their shoes and think about why they would want to engage with you - if you're not sure, ask them

seek advice from others who have previously worked with your audience

For a more detailed overview of who might want to engage with you and how they might benefit, the Planning for Impact Toolkit developed by the University's Research & Innovation Services is a useful resource. If you want to engage specifically with policymakers and public groups interested in health research get in touch with:

the Institute for Policy Research who can offer expertise in forging links between research and policy worlds or be able to support you to engage with policymakers

Bath Research & Development who can offer support in involving in health research those with experience of a particular health condition, service users and members of the public.

The National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement has a range of resources that can also help when thinking about who to engage.

Public engagement can be connected to any stage of the research process - it's never too early or too late to engage the public in your work.

Engagement across the research lifecycle

You engagement priorities will vary depending on where you are in your research lifecycle. It may not be relevant for you to engage throughout the whole lifecycle, just at certain times. Or you may look to engage different audiences at different stages of your research. You should take whatever approach makes the most sense for your research.

Consider how you'll engage right at the beginning of the lifecycle. Not only will this ensure you're thinking about who to engage with and how to engage with them, it'll also mean you can include plans in your grant proposal.

UK Research and Innovation require you to complete a Pathways to Impact statement in grant proposals. Through this, you can resource your engagement activities. The University's Research & Innovation Services has developed a Planning for Impact Toolkit designed to support you in completion of your impact statement.

Thinking about when to engage

When thinking about when is the best time to engage public groups, there are certain things you might like to consider:

looking for existing opportunities to engage your audience (for example, regular meetings they may hold)

thinking about times and events where there are many people in one place (for example, festivals)

prioritising your audience's convenience over your own

seeking out a representative amongst your selected public and ask them for advice

The National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement have a guide to working in partnership with others.

Once you've decided why and who, you can then think about the best format to engage in order to achieve your objectives and that is best suited to the target public groups and maximise the impact of your research.

For inspiration, check out some of the case studies we have put together of public engagement activities researchers at the University have developed and delievered.

The National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement has developed some practical guides on methods for engaging the public that include skills required, things to bear in mind and cost and time requirements.

Thinking about how to engage

The methods and techniques you choose to use can be aligned to your reasons for engagement.

To inform and inspire

Festivals

Exhibitions

Social media

Television and radio programmes

Websites

Debates, lectures and talks

Newsletters

To consult or listen

Surveys and questionnaires

Feedback forms

Focus groups

Citizens' juries

Ballots and voting

Advisory panels

Public meetings

To collaborate

Open space events

Stakeholder dialogue

Patient panels

Consensus workshops

Partnership brokering

Steering groups

Mediation

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Engaging public groups with your research

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A quick-start how-to guide to engaging public groups with your research.

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How can art and design bring people together to improve our mental health?

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Going through mental health services in England can be a disillusioning and traumatic process; with rife accounts of being passed around different departments in the NHS and continually facing long-wait lists for services.

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Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? was published earlier this year to coincide with GraphicDesign&'s exhibition of the same name that is currently on show at the Wellcome Collection. It examines the varied and vital relationship between graphic design and health, focussing on work that demonstrates how communication strategies and visual languages are employed to persuade, inform and ultimately protect. The book asks its contributors to respond to the title question and demonstrates how graphic design impacts what we notice, what we understand and the actions we take. "In short, we hope that readers of the book will think the answer to the question is: yes!"

We spoke to GraphicDesign& and asked them to consider the role of graphic design specifically in the world of mental health. "When we founded GraphicDesign&, we were motivated by a desire to demonstrate the value that graphic design brings and the role that it plays in the wider world," co-founders Lucienne Roberts and Rebecca Wright, and GD& associate Sarah Schrauwen told us. "As advocates for our subject, we believe that designers and creatives have much to contribute to the area of mental health, where imagination and ingenuity can transform the communication, diagnosis, awareness and support." To demonstrate this conviction, we asked the trio to outline three projects that successfully support and impact mental wellbeing in diverse ways.

Ollie Alpin - Mind Journal

Mind Journal was created by graphic designer Ollie Alpin, inspired by his personal experience of anxiety, panic attacks and mental breakdown. Aimed at men, who are less likely to feel comfortable talking about their problems, he designed a discrete and stylish hard-bound journal that provides a structured framework for daily entries, encouraging writing as a way to navigate the challenges of life. Ollie sought input from academics, psychologists and user-testers, creating prototypes before finalising his product, which he funded through crowd-source fundraiser Kickstarter.

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GraphicDesign& outline three projects that successfully support and impact mental wellbeing

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Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? was published earlier this year to coincide with GraphicDesign&'s exhibition of the same name that is currently on show at the Wellcome Collection. It examines the varied and vital relationship between graphic design and health, focussing on work that demonstrates how communication strategies and visual languages are employed to persuade, inform and ultimately protect.

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Eight of the most thought-provoking design responses to mental health

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For World Mental Health Day, we've rounded up eight designs that address the increasingly prevalent topic of mental wellbeing, including a hand-held anxiety reducer and a metaphorical gun that fires tears. Mindnosis by Sara Lopez Ibanez Having had her own negative experiences with mental health services, design graduate Sara Lopez Ibanez created a self-assessment kit to support those with similar issues.

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Architecture practice Caukin Studio has created a pop-up library with a thatched roof and a "tropical" interior intended to give people a private place to journal and raise awareness around mental health.

The studio, which specialises in creating accessible architecture that has a positive social impact, installed the thatched library inside a converted skip in collaboration with Skip Gallery.

The library's design responds to the needs of locals who might not otherwise discuss their feelings by encouraging them to write about their feelings in a journal.

Local therapy service Self Space collaborated with the studio to advise on supporting mental health.

"We've always been interested in how architecture and art can create positive social impact both in its function and the way in which it's been designed," Caukin Studio cofounder Harrison Marshall told Dezeen.

"The project aims to transport visitors out of the hustle and bustle of central London, and into a cosy personal space where they feel comfortable releasing some of their personal thoughts."

Catherine Borowski, cofounder of Skip Gallery says that the studio placed the library inside a skip because it acts as "a vessel for everything we want to discard."

The interior - which is brightly coloured and made from natural materials - seeks to create a safe, nurturing atmosphere where people feel comfortable enough to talk about their mental health.

At the entrance, bright colours and lights are used to evoke different emotions and memories. Pink lighting seeks to ensconce visitors in a warm glow while blue paint is meant to reflect a bright sky.

Inside, verdant plants and self-help books line the timber shelves while visitors can sit on a wooden bench to journal in a private, serene environment.

Karl Lenton designs egg-shaped movable therapy pods for prisons

"A big part of the design challenge was to create somewhere that could transport visitors away from the busy, concrete jungle of central London," explained Marshall.

"We took inspiration from the projects we've completed in more tropical parts of the world, and created a space made from natural materials; with thatch cladding that you're more likely to find by an Indonesian beach than next to a London office block."

According to Marshall, now more than ever, people need an outlet to express how they are feeling. The architect cites the coronavirus pandemic as one of the key factors driving this trend.

"The Feelings Library is a creative way to create connectedness at a time many of us feel at our most lonely and disconnected," he said.

"It's been a challenging two years for us all, we have been isolated, uncertain and at times life has felt upside down."

"Journaling is an important tool for processing thoughts, with the simple act of converting feelings into written words, people are forced to reflect on what's going through their head; these books aim to provide a space to do exactly that," he continued.

After three weeks, the installation will be dismantled. The roof will be composted while the other materials will be sent to the Harris Academy Peckham school in south London where the studio will hold workshops to create a new structure.

Other temporary projects in East London area include designer Yinka Ilori's Launderette of Dreams, which reimagines the everyday community space as a children's play zone.

London architect Asif Khan installed three plant-filled rooms across Shoreditch that were intended to create places for people to meet up on their way to and from work.
Photography is by Aron Klein unless otherwise stated. The installation is at Spitalfields Market until 24 December 2021.

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London's Feelings Library is designed to improve visitor's mental health

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Architecture practice Caukin Studio has created a pop-up library intended to give people a private place to journal and raise awareness about mental health.

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A therapeutic environment is not only a physical space, but a psychological, social and cultural one. Designers play a positive role in healthcare by creating safe environments for wellness and healing that maximise the restorative powers of nature and place.

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An estimated 26% of Americans, ages 18 and older, suffer from a mental disorder in a given year. That is about one in four U.S. adults, and of that group, most do not seek treatment. Further, 40% of college students reported they felt so depressed it impaired how they functioned. This, by definition, is a health crisis.

Advocacy for healthcare starts at the education level. Moreover, the way students learn about health and well-being creates the foundation for the whole healthcare system. This said, higher education institutions and designers alike agree that a university cannot be successful without addressing the mental health of its students, faculty, and staff.

When designed under WELL standards, buildings can have a positive impact on the mental health and well-being for their occupants. The WELL Building Institute - according to their website - applies the science of how physical and social environments affect human health, well-being and performance. Developed over ten years and backed by the latest scientific research - including over 7,000 citations - WELL outlines key building-level and organizational strategies across ten categories.
The 11 WELL concepts are as follows:
As The Ohio State University's College of Nursing expansion is on its final touches, we reflect on four ways to design using WELL strategies to improve well-being and mental health. These were the four primary goals for the project that were expressed during the early visioning charrettes led by MA Design with the project's users and University stakeholders.

1 - Stress Reduction and Support for Emotional Health
The WELL Mind concept encourages health and well-being through policy, program and design strategies. These strategies and design elements are guided by research that states there is a connectedness and relationship between the mind and the body. In other words, our physical health affects our mental health and vice versa. This said, it is key that the built environment allows access to physical spaces of respite, as well the promotion of tools for the keeping of emotional health.

A space can support the physical and mental well-being of students and staff by including:

Overall, stress reduction and support of emotional health surrounds the idea of providing occupants an opportunity and place to replenish their energy.

2- Access to Daylight
Research shows that exposure to sunlight is critical for mental and physical health and well-being. WELL states that buildings should utilize daylight as a primary source of lighting.

The WELL Light concept requires that the following conditions are met:

75% of all workstations are within 25ft of an atrium or a window with views to the exterior

95% of all workstations are within 41ft of an atrium or a window with views to the exterior

The incorporation of daylight in the built environment improves mental health through adequate light exposure.

3- Active Movement and Exercise
The intent of the WELL Movement concept is to promote physical activity through the built environment, policies and programs.

For example, Heminger Hall incorporated a monumental staircase and designed a walking loop that is a quarter mile long. On this walking path, there are markers to display how far someone has walked, and also how many steps they've climbed. This walking path is also filled with inspirational quotes.
4- Social Connections and Connectedness
The WELL Community standard intends for a built environment to implement policies that foster social cohesion and community.

For example, giving students and faculty the choice and flexibility to reconfigure furniture to allow for any given situation, providing varied and activated social spaces, as well as place branded / purpose branded gathering spaces, are all design strategies to foster community and connections.

When WELL design standards are followed, it is not only about the building itself, but also the policies that are implemented under WELL certifications. Following WELL standards shows a commitment to the well-being of all who utilize a building. In the end, designing with WELL principles for students, faculty and staff reveals the deep commitment to education and fostering of mental and physical health, and supports a client's vision of wellness.

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Four Ways to Design Under WELL to Improve Well-Being and Mental Health Outcomes for Students and Teachers - MA Design

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How designing with WELL principles for students and staff shows a deep commitment to education and mental well-being for all.

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We DESIGN recharge rooms, restorative spaces & WELLNESS ROOMS

aligned with WELL Building Standard healthy interiordesignprinciples

suitable for corporate workspaces, coworking offices, coliving and residential developments

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Wellness Room Designer | Restorative Recharge Room Designers

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Biofilico creates wellness and restorative recharge rooms that align with the WELL healthy building standard guidelines, biophilic design and interior concepts.

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Mental Health benefits of listening to Lo-fi music.

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Mental Health benefits of listening to Lo-fi music.

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Lo-fi can help turn a stimulating environment into a relaxing one and boost your focus and productivity when you need it.

Lo-fi is more raw and embraces imperfections, such as ambient noise, static, or the hum of background conversations.

Lo-fi’s relaxing beats and soothing rhythms may make the moment feel lighter and brighter.

The soothing nature of lo-fi music might help with thinking and creativity. It may stimulate brain activity and aids in problem-solving and innovative thinking.

The calming effects of lo-fi music might be a natural remedy, although not a cure, for anxiety and depression. Lo-fi may help to slow down the mind, reduce cortisol levels, and create a peaceful ambiance that can lessen anxious feelings.

If your attention span is more sporadic, lo-fi may help. The repetitive beats might make it easier to get into flow state. This can also be helpful if you’re using the music as background for a mindfulness practice. The rhythm of the music may help ground you in the present moment.

Lo-fi music may help lower stress levels, putting you in a better mental state for concentrating and retaining information.

As much as we all love singing along to our favorite songs, lyrics can be distracting. Lo-fi skips the lyrics, focuses on rhythm. In that way lo-fi music may help you concentrate on what's in front of you and limit distractions.

Lo-fi music may reduce stress levels and encourage the release of dopamine, a chemical associated with feelings of pleasure.

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I used parts of our colouring in doodle to create this flyer.

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I used parts from our colouring in doodle that we drew as a group to create this flyer.