Be bold again. Have Child-like Creativity!

I only begun to understand the noble vocation of the interior designer in my late 20’s. I partly blame school and my parents for not exposing me enough to the multitudes of industries available for work. But, I mostly blame myself for being a bum for the most part of my youth.

So you can imagine my excitement when my children’s school asked me to swing by for a short show-and-tell about what I do for a living. I was exhilarated, and agreed immediately. I took some time to plan, but instead of a solo-act, I threw heads together at the firm, and we came up with a program. We decked out a kid-friendly (short) presentation, and activities for children to get busy with. 

Our interior designer, Farrah, spear-headed this initiative and came up with brilliant ideas, and executed them to perfection. Both children and teachers were enthralled and captivated by her ‘performance’. 

We had hoped that the presentation would stick, and we would one day, by some glimmer of a chance, be credited by a rising young star designer. 

Who are we kidding? The kids were so young. They were tiny too.

But, what actually stuck, was an observation that we shared during a post-debrief. 

When asked about her overall experience at the show-and-tell, Farrah quipped, ‘I generally feel like, at work, we are just like kids.. being creative all day. Their (children’s) daily games are quite similar to what we do- just that, ours is a lot more serious. LOL’

During the engagement session, we instructed the children to go crazy and color in a bedroom that we’ve drawn for them. Aside from colouring the room, they could slap on stickers that we printed for them as well. ‘Get creative, go crazy!’, we told them. 

Looking back at some of the artwork produced by the children, it seems like the output would grow seemingly more refined (assuming that there is a standard to children’s colouring work) according to the age of the class. For example, comparing the kindergarten (6 year olds) class’ colored bedroom to the the playgroup class’ (2 year olds). The older class mostly had nicely coordinated colors, being coloured within the confines of the bold lines of the picture. Whereas, the playgroup class had stickers off-centre, crushed paper, and crayons in their mouths. If you were lucky, you’d get a few lines across the page. 

Both group’s outcomes were thoroughly contrasting, each unique and pleasing in its own way. The process though, was thought-provoking. We observed that both groups had a creative output from a choice of different mediums (paper, crayons, colouring pens, stickers, saliva in some instances). Both groups, though end-result looking very different, had the same power to evoke some sort of emotion or reaction to the viewer after the work was complete. Either ‘oh wow, that’s such a colourful bedroom’ or ‘oh wow. that’s so many stickers’. Every child within the kindergarten (the older children) produced quite homogenous and similar work. But each playgroup (the younger children) child’s work were individually unique within the group. 

The brief was never to create a nice bedroom, but ‘get creative and go crazy’. Uncovering different methods to enable this consequence needed a less experienced, bolder and wilder bunch to fulfil. 

As we mature, learn, and get ‘wiser’, it seems that we grow to conform to a certain standard of what is right. The fear of making errors and mistakes or simply, the fear of failure becomes overwhelming. The fear of ‘being wrong’ and the embarrassment associated with it might appear to be too hard to bear. This threatens creativity. 

As designers, it is a constant challenge to understand, select and implement the processes for creativity. How do we remain creative in a world that is commercially demanding? Can we build a safe environment to allow for mistakes for better creativity, but yet have a high standard of professional output?

Can we learn from the youth? Can we unlearn our old habits? Can we have child-like creativity again?