What you see here is an experiment Derren Brown, a famous mentalist, did on 2 guys from a creative agency. He gave them a project to work on for a couple of hours, and then he tried to predict what their ideas would be. Obviously he can’t see in the future and you’d think that geniune inspiration comes from within. The thing is, we are being inspired every day, at every specific moment without knowing it.
The reason why I’m writing a post about it, is because I recently experience something alike. I’m currently in a workshop for packaging design and we have a complete week to brainstorm and explore unknown territory in the packaging business. It’s all fun and games but yesterday I made a startling discovery. For the past week, while working on some ideas, we turned on the radio but barely noticeable, just to have some ambient noise. We were discussing and drawing ideas, constantly bouncing ideas back and forth. Mindmaps and moodboards are up on the wall and we needed a catchphrase. One sentence, bald and strong that would sum up everything we were talking about. Our idea is to get people to explore our beer in a gastronomic way. We started out with some rubbish sentences but eventually, we found it: Experience beer differently.
Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine while she was driving, the same radiostation as before was playing in the background, there was a commercial and normally I don’t pay a lot of attention to those because they annoy me to hell! But I heard something earlier in that commercial and I listened more carefully. The commercial had a catchphrase: Experience music differently. During our mindmapping and moodboarding that commercial must have played and subconsiously it got stuck there. We could’ve been 100% sure that it was geniune inspiration, a result of bouncing off ideas to one another but now it was just a simple connection to a single commercial.
My bottomline is: we are constantly influenced by different visual or auditive elements that creating something new, is initially nothing more then taking certain elements around us and making a new puzzle with it. So whenever you feel like you have no inspiration, just go on a trip to a place where you haven’t been in ages! I’m sure it’ll trigger something!