I’m really not a morning person, my circadian clock cringes whenever it’s forced to rise before 7am. However, the promise of a freshly brewed, extra strong, double shot of morning inspo was enough to lure me out of bed last Friday.
Creative Mornings is a breakfast lecture series for the creative community, and this month, the theme was Reality. Reality on the surface feels so tangible, so concrete. But… in reality, it isn’t quite that simple. After catching up with a few familiar faces and eating roughly my weight in free mini bagels and croissants, I sat down to listen to this month’s guest speaker, Anna Jackson, spin some truths.
Anna is a lecturer at Colab, the ‘collaboratory’ for design and Creative Technologies at AUT. She also co-founded the documentary initiative Loading Docs (a Launchpad for New Zealand documentary shorts, if you have 3 minutes spare, check one out! My favourite is ‘Dancing in the Dark’). Here’s what I took away from the talk, so I thought I’d share it with you guys!
“If we want to change reality, we need to see it.”
Much of what we do as designers is creating a reality. We set the context for how content will be perceived by people. A viewer will start forming judgements about a piece of design within a few milliseconds. Long before they’ve read a single word, they’ve formed opinions based solely on the design created to hold the all important message. If you wish to change the way people see reality, you need to show them. They need to see it to believe it. It’s all about influencing perception.
Here at insight we work on awesome projects every day that visually portray a reality in one way or another. We find ourselves in quite a powerful position because we can choose how to best show these in engaging, insightful, entertaining ways that can have a real impact on people, make them think or feel a certain way and effect change.
There was also a sweet-as virtual reality demonstration, I had a turn on “The Green Fairy”, a story-driven experience by Master of Creative technologies student Alejandro Davila. Lovely, lots of fairies and mushrooms, see the pics of me enjoying it way too much below.
