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Good ideas are hard to come by. Confidence in my own ability to make them really held me back, even in the final year of my design degree, and as a young freelancer. The pressure of a deadline, the worry of not being able to draw well, even the conscious reward of grade or payment, conspired to chew away at my ability to fly a fledgling concept and see where it could go.


As a teacher, I see in the classroom all the time.


Being creative isn’t always easy; those who know how might earn at least a decent living salary doing it professionally, if not the millions that might come to a particularly gifted (and lucky) few.


The world is constantly looking for ideas that are ‘creative’. Though experts might argued about the exact definition, creativity is considered to be a measure of how unique something is, and how useful it is. A chocolate teapot might be a novel idea (i.e. a new way to use a material) but it is not massively useful, could be argued as not a creative idea. Achieving both novel AND useful is hard. Further, some add moral value into the criteria too… it can really make your brain ache!


When I started teaching, I was bothered by the insistence from management that my pupils’ books were maintained as highly curated collections of little manuscripts, with underlined titles, neatly numbered drawings, drafted accurately with rulers, and perfectly scribed annotations. Traces of error or blemish perfectly erased from history….


What designer, going through the experimental and sometimes messy, idea generation process, really works like that?! As if the classroom environment might not be artificial enough for pupils to freely record the contents of their imagination, let's make them worry about the judgement or sanction they might receive for using the wrong type of pencil!


If you can imagine rushing to record an idea at 3am before the working memory fails and the next idea comes along, you’d possibly be more on point about how early ideas are captured. If all you have is a scrappy post-it and an exhausted marker pen, then so be it! That sketch was a million times more valuable to me than the one I made for my tutors (often a retrospective tracing of a prototype photo, pretending to be an early idea, as I didn’t know how to draw from my imagination).


When studying for my MEd, a good decade (or more) ago, I researched how motivation to be creative can be altered by teachers during the idea generation process, and specifically how it could be reduced by enforcing ‘rules’ related to presentation. For pupils who don’t feel they are confident sketchers, struggle to be ‘neat’, or have brains which work faster than their hands can move, this can be super destructive.


Keeping children engaged in an activity that is inherently difficult is….. inherently difficult. Many children will give up when they don’t quickly get a sense of achievement. My challenge as a teacher is to grab early self-efficacy wins, securing engagement to see an idea through. But equally, the stakes have to be low. Counterintuitively, I have to make them feel it doesn’t matter what they produce, that anything is valid, but also completely valueless unless they wish to pursue it. When the pressure to be neat, produce immaculate sketch work, or throw out amazing ideas is off, the climate for experimenting is on. It doesn’t have to work, it doesn’t have to bear any fruit. I relax, so they relax. And they experiment because it doesn’t matter what happens, what it looks like, or what others think.


And guess what? Pupils create ideas that they didn’t expect because the climate is right for experimental failure and accidental success. It works, and those successes come, even when a child believes that they are not able to generate any worthy ideas.


The early stages of creative development for me could easily be summed up in a word- PLAY.


And what’s more, I’ve found the strategies that work for children, work for me as a jewellery designer. Low-stakes play specifically lowers the creativity hurdle. And that’s a bit of a contradiction when you are running a business dependent largely on your creative performance!


‘Play’ sounds unstructured, frivolous and not exactly professional. But playful doesn’t mean unstructured. To metaphorically throw all your paper in the air and expect them to land in exactly the right place is of course, unreasonable, and likewise play, done systematically, works. More on that in another blog.


I find that my ideas only go so far on paper. That’s really a personal preference. I’m a good enough sketcher but I really need to see ideas in three dimensions. To best exploit the process of experimentation, I play with sketch models, usually in similar materials to which I might make; copper instead of silver removes another creative hurdle- anxiety over cost!


My first idea is never my best. It’s only after going through trying numerous different possibilities, can I confidently select the best to develop into a final concept.


Remember I said previously, no judgements? Play is free from that, it explores each possibility as equal to the next. I find a photo of each experiment will effortlessly log the journey travelled, so I that when I’m ready to judge one idea against the other, I can refer back. If I don’t capture an idea, it will be lost as the next steals the focus.


This whole process could take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours, but it has to be given time it needs, without pressure. Sometimes a rest when progress is slow can be useful too.


So, my response to the question posed in this blog is this:


Good ideas come from the freedom and time to play with different possibilities, in a low stakes and zero judgement context.


For a professional jeweller, the time to do this is not only massively challenging, it is an essential part of the job.



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Updated: Apr 5, 2023

My sketchbook is a masterpiece. I doubt to other many other people, but to me, it’s pretty awesome. In fact, I have many, gathered over several decades.


I’ve never really thought of writing about the process of sketch-booking until I recently responded to a post about it on Facebook group for professional jewellers. I realised that I had quite a bit to say about them and so I’m writing this article to explain why I think they are a fundamental part of a creative business, and actually, well, life in general.


Despite doing lots of art and DT as a school kid, it was much later, during my Product Design degree I learnt the value of keeping a sketchbook on the go, putting something in it on a daily basis, and keeping it close by me for that spontaneous entry that would disappear if not committed to paper. I got through ten or so over the course of my degree. I’d fill it with drawings of stuff around me, inspirational cuttings from design magazines, concepts for various projects. It was the media in which we might undergo what I later know as the ‘geneplore’ process; generating and exploring possibilities, capturing the elements that would inform thinking, and concretising them into new design concepts.


To me my sketchbook was also a visual diary, a platform for expressive artwork and ideation, documenting my development as a fledgling artist and designer. Though looking back on it now with a degree of cringing, it was a commonly used device for recording idealistic expressions of naïve points of view, and the angst of early twenty-something romances and heartbreaks… I’m sure you get the idea!


Anyway, since those days, I have been fortunate enough to have worked as a head of DT in two new secondary schools. When I set up my first department, I had the rare opportunity to develop a brand new culture, set in place new learning protocols, and offer my vision for the education in design. And I saw the sketchbook as a fundamental tool. An experienced colleague told me she’d always bought the highest quality sketchbooks for pupils that her department budget could stretch to and encouraged me to do the same. We are talking spiral bound, highest quality cartridge paper and silver foil embossed school logo on the front! The idea was, if we give them something to value and we show we value their ideas, then THEY will value their ideas. I did that for the many years I held that role (ok, not the spiral binding-that’s just too expensive for schools these days) and it paid off massively. And pupils have every reason to value them their sketchbooks. They are a platform for creativity, an extension of their minds, and every single idea it contains is precious.


In the same way that ‘being creative’ very often requires instruction, using a sketchbook is likewise. I try to teach the importance of sketchbooks as early as I can. There are several strong messages I try to impart when pupils are using them. Here are a few:


1. To most, a blank page is terrifying. So I often get them to start with ‘de-blanking’ the page so that it loses its threat. Ideas can flow without anxiety, or ‘getting it wrong’.

2. Because every idea is precious, we don’t use rubbers or cross things out; no design is a mistake. We are not restrained, so we don’t sketch ‘neatly’, unless of course, that comes naturally (I'm totally serious when I say I've literally written a thesis on this one). But we are ALWAYS thoughtful, and we remember every idea has value.

3. Design isn’t binary, there are no right or wrong answers, but some ideas are better than others, and those lesser ideas are still an avenue worth exploring and ruling out, they stay there dormant, until we might choose to activate them. So we sketch without judgement, until we are ready to make decisions.

4. And the sketchbook, as an extension of our minds, is precious. We look after it, we treasure it.

5. (I love this one) If it doesn't close flat, you have used it well. What I mean by this is FILL IT UP. Throw all your experiments in it and annotate around them. My most recent sketchbook is a hefty old weight with the araldited copper and silver samples of various experiments that went well, and more importantly, those that didn't.


These days, my sketchbook is used alongside the many creative apps that exist. I absolutely love apps like Pinterest, Houzz, National Geographic, Instagram for inspiration…. Perhaps I’m old fashioned and sometimes I find it good to collate interesting images in paper form and sketch alongside them. Turn them upside down, put a mirror next to them, get out the copper wire and sketch model, photographing and printing the outcome in my sketchbook before it gets lost somewhere in the computer or the everyday pile of things to do…


Anyway, these are the notions and methods that have worked for me. My sketchbook is a massively important part of my everyday practice as both a jewellery designer and teacher. That said, I rarely come to very final ideas through my sketchbook (a personal way of working that is for a future article). For me, my sketchbook is a library of thought, a record of the design experiments and journeys that get so far on paper, and equally, of those not yet fulfilled.



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