By Kyle Foreman

Head or Heart

After a marathon masterclass from Mark Palmer, my head was ready to pop and float away to a simpler place.

The amount of knowledge and insight Marc laid on us was astounding. For me it really made me understand how to develop my ideas. How you can’t just have a hipster beard and drink espresso. There has to be a process, a struggle, an insight, a purpose for communicating and most importantly that idea.

The lecture started with the line “There is no such thing as a new idea just unseen plagiarism.”  Mark went on to explain how our brains are pretty useless as we grow older, losing curiosity and that childlike sense of imagination.

He then showed us a picture of a cardboard box from his 198 slideshow presentation, he asked us what we saw, we all responded with “ A cardboard box.” Only for him to change slides and show a child using it as a spaceship, a house, another planet, anything that his imagination could dream up.

Our brains are constantly acting out habits that we perceive as new actions, but really we are just going through the motions. It’s easy not to think but it’s much harder to do the opposite.

We then moved on to ways of freeing the brain and a step by step method that could rid our brains of inertia and help us create those brilliant insights and ideas. 

Then came “ We can always reject, but we need to have the thought first.” Another mind opening thought, I felt through out this lecture I was a nail being smacked into place by the hammer that was Mark Palmer’s insight.

One example/way of getting you to that place would be to randomise.

By doing this you disrupt the idea, you give yourself space and your mind can freely explore possibilities rather than being tied down to creating that killer idea. You need to get rid of the pressure a brief brings and get everything out of your system that relates or not. Even choosing objects and brainstorming them for ideas can help give you a different direction, making your brain move across into intuitive preference.

You must always bring it back to the brief. Below is a simple diagram of the proposed process or framework.

This is a small bite size chunk of what I took away, I think this has made me hungry and made me respect good work when I see it. I think this will become a benchmark for how I move forward on the course.

“ A wall is harder to knock down if there is another built behind it.”  – This quote is by me.