I've discovered throughout my life that I'm not a particularly creative person, at least by what I feel is the traditional definition: coming up with wholly (or mostly) original ideas. I tend to get most of my ideas from finding stuff and thinking of ways to tweak them so that they fit something I want to do or how I think they should work. In truth, I have to imagine this what creativity truly is, as ideas completely unrelated to existing ideas/products are so rare that you could say they don't exist.
This past week, I encountered a wonderful site called "My Next Tweet." When you give it a Twitter account to look at, it scours all of the posts that person has made and then cobbles together a new tweet based on what has been said previously. Most of the results are giberish, but I liked the idea. So, I made a simple (and definitely unfinished) web "app" I'm calling Catharsis. It has flips through a pre-generated list of statements/affirmations and allows users to enter their own. It accomplishes the goal of letting people know a side of me I rarely share, as well as let mess around with the concept of making a web app and get a little more experience working with a typographic interface. Here's the link: http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~brjgraha/catharsis/
My weakest assignment was definitely the stuffed animal one. Part of it I think was due to not knowing that you weren't expecting to get these back, so my ideas were simpler and, due to procrastinating, I didn't even do my initial idea. Also, I'm not sure I ever "got" what the purpose of that assignment was. I thought of it sort of as a "egg project redux" which I also was not happy with my end-result. My issue seems to be with having true and utter freedom to work. I prefer to work in a scenario where I'm playing in someone else's sandbox or have some sort of theme or loose structure. Obviously, I should have come up with my own restrictions for those assignments since I now know that's how I prefer to work.
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