A Few Minutes of Design: 52 Activities to Spark Your Creativity

By Emily Campbell

"A marvelous invitation to anyone with an interest in creativity, invention, and design." (Michael Bierur) This colorful, handy card deck presents fifty-two
exercises and activities to jump-start your creative juices, free you from
creative block, start a new project, or finish an existing one. Each exercise
offers insight into the innumerable small decisions involved in design:
How to establish a pattern, continue a series, how to say it without words, how to name a project, what fits, and what doesn't? These cards benefit established practicing designers or creatives in any field with activities that are sometimes playful, sometimes
challenging, but always enlightening. Each activity is estimated to take 15 minutes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Release date: Sep 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781616897703

Book preview

A FEW MINUTES OF DESIGN

INTRODUCTION

What comes to mind when you hear the word design? A modernist chair or lamp? Minimalist Japanese fashion? An Apple i-device? Most often we think of manufactured or built objects—functional things we need and stylish things we want, small handheld or wearable items, structures we can sit at or sit on, and containers for our stuff. Our thoughts might expand to include the architectural scale—inhabitable structures, the roof over our head, or the metal volumes that enclose us in transit by air, sea, and land.

Large or small, we tend to think of designed things as the finished product. This can make it hard to imagine what it’s like to design them. But in pursuit of their vision of these finished products, designers are preoccupied by innumerable small decisions. How to join this part to that; how to establish a pattern or continue a series; how to say something without words; how best to terminate a shape or to group or classify elements and illuminate their significance; how to determine what fits or follows the rule, and what doesn’t. A Few Minutes of Design is an insight into these preoccupations.

The cards evoke what it’s like to be a designer through a series of accessible, concise exercises. Some ask you to draw and others to write; some