Proposal

The past four years of working in a continuously stimulating environment that is overflowing with creativity and imagination have indeed challenged my mind and further influenced me into the woman I am today as I approach graduation. I can feel my focus shift towards topics that I had little interest in prior to being in art school, and I can’t help but wonder if there is a correlation here. This has led me to consider all the people in my life that are pushing their minds every single day to imagine new ideas and new forms of solution solving in the world through all their avenues of creating. There is a powerful pattern that I’ve observed in my peers and faculty, and that’s the strength of empathy. This semester, I will search for the connection between creativity and empathy, as I try to understand if collective creativity shared amongst our society can help build empathy to further create social change and solve societal issues. Furthermore, what power would creativity hold if everyone (outside of the art school) utilized it once a day? The question I will seek out this semester is “How might an interactive system that utilizes creativity once a day help young people build empathy to solve complex social issues?”

There are other questions that this large one has led me to such as:

How might creative action inspire others to be creative? How can creativity be used as a tool to create revolutionary social change? What is the connection between empathy and imagination? How is social change linked to creativity/imagination? How does creativity help us imagine the future? These questions have seemingly endless answers and open up a door of possibilities for the future usage of creativity.

The main audience in my conversation, exploration, and research will be young individuals (Millennials and Gen Z) because at this point in time, these generations are catapulting major social change and the momentum is highest with them. Millennials and Generation Z are both more open to the ways in which the American society is evolving. These age groups are more racially and ethnically diverse than ever before, are open to challenging roles of government. Generation Z is predicted to be the most well-educated generation yet. I would say a majority are readily able to listen already, and although there is still a percentage that is uninterested in social change, I feel this group of individuals is my best shot to work within what I aim to accomplish and discover. These generations of individuals already hold empathy to some degree because they are presenting radical ideas unlike their predecessors, so I think they would have more potential if daily creativity was introduced through interactions. Millennials and Generation Z are affected by the problem I hope to solve, and they are also the answer. As a Generation Z member myself, I realize the potential this niche has to be the audience of my project. I thought about aiming to research niches that are not open to this kind of thinking, such as older generations, but the younger generations are paving the future today, and are shaping what the world will look like in the next 100 years and after that.

I want to discover what creativity means to different individuals and how that plays out in their lives. To break this down even further, what does creativity actually mean? Understanding the neuroscience behind creativity will be key to understanding how it can impact a person’s everyday usage. I also think it will be crucial to explore the psychological impacts of these neurological actions and how they affect the development of an individual over long or short periods of time. Does the brain miss some valid part of the development to thought when individuals do not exercise their imagination? What happens when creativity is introduced at a young age compared to later? I seek to understand just how vital imagination is to the development of the brain. Another important learning outcome will be understanding just how available creativity is to everyone. Are there demographics that lack the access or understanding of using the brain in this way? Who is interested in creativity? Who isn’t? Do you need money to utilize creativity at its highest levels? Are there benefits to working patterns of people who exercise their creativity? And lastly, I want to understand if there is true research that shows if humans who are more creative hold higher levels of empathy. As I stated earlier, this is an experience I have observed, but is there true science that can back up my observations? I think yes. I know that through this important research, I will also discover how truly willing Millennials and Generation Z are to understanding creativity and its development of empathy, and the power it holds in social change. I will discover how ready these generations are for societal change as a whole. Through this, I will understand myself better, and the neuroscience behind my motives in my own imagination.

I will begin my process by diving into scholarly articles to see if empathy and creativity are connected. I will be consuming more scholarly articles and books on the topic of psychology, neuroscience, and the links between creativity, imagination, and social change. After I collect a fair amount of secondary research, I will interact with individuals that make up the Millennial and Generation Z community through interviews to gain insight and research. I will probably create some sort of visual game through photos to gather research into my topics as well. I do not know how this would be possible yet due to COVID-19 restrictions, but I think it would be valuable to set up a social experiment to further my research. I will approach the solution as an interactive system of some degree. I am thinking the solution could exist as an interactive online space, but also a physical space as well. The online space would serve as the everyday dose of creative energy, and the physical space would be for collaboration and installations that would towards building empathy in creative environments that ultimately work towards social innovation.

Everyone should care about this exploration because it impacts everyone. Through my research, I seek to explore a gift that each human is capable of taking advantage of in their own minds. Imagination has always spurred incredible change. Every good historical figure of the past has used their radicalized imagination to envision a different world for humanity and spurred something incredible. If creativity is linked to empathy, then we can shift the way humanity functions as a whole. I know that major social change does not happen overnight, but the important work takes a long time. Every person has something to bring to the table of society. We are all in this together, and we are building the world for the ones that come after us. I’ve observed close hand that people that engage with creative thought are more empathetic to the world around them, so therefore a shift in others’ minds could create social change on a larger scale. More importantly, with the unfolding events of a tumultuous year such as 2020, it is clear to other designers and me that now is the time to activate long-awaited change. We are picking up the pieces of a year that has brought racial injustice, climate crisis, turmoil, political insanity, nationwide division, economic collapse, and a deadly worldwide pandemic. This year has been existed of many moments of awakening for myself personally, but also for the nation. Even the skeptics, the racists, the ignorant individuals, somewhere deep down hold the power to unlock empathy, and I believe this can be reached through creativity. The human brain differs from animals because we have space in-between our input and output region. We have the ability to process information, ponder situations, soak up environments, forge new possibilities, then act on them. This means that our prefrontal cortex has the ability to imagine what is not directly in front of us, but we can build and create new solutions from the data. We have the ability to imagine a new world that isn’t the one we live in. After everything I’ve encountered this year, as a designer I have hope in the research I will discover. I believe there is a collective shift in consciousness currently. You can feel it! As history has taught us, each day today impacts how the world operates decades and decades afterward. Each day today has an opportunity to create milestones and pave new directions for how our social structures are approached and built for the coming future.

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” - Mother Teresa