Childs Play



The Two Sides of the Brain
Taken From: http://1.bp.blogspot.com

In order to utilise the creative brain we must first understand it. Although not literally the brain is split into two sides, the left and the right. The left hemisphere is thought to deal with black and white areas of our life, for example things that are clear and logical like a maths problems. The right hemisphere is thought to deal with the grey areas, for example art and writing like drawing a picture or writing a story. Another way to look at the two sides is that the right is full of hippies (no offence) that are free and creative and the left is full of office workers who are trapped within their cubicles working to ridged deadlines. You could also look at the right side as child and the lefts side the parent.

No matter what you decide is up there in the two sides of your brain it is important to understand what this means in terms of producing an outcome of work and how the two sides of your brain effect this. The right hemisphere of your brain is like the part of you that never grew up, the child in all of us. It is innocent, creative, sensitive, experimental, playful and curious. This side, is the side that is best let run free with its creativity. Allowing your brain to express the playful and experimental side allows us to create; whether that be images, designs, patterns or just simply drawing on paper. The left side is the side of us that continued to grow up with us, the adult. This is the side where we apply logic, where we evaluate, organizes and criticise. The left side is usually over active when it comes to being creative as we are quick to criticise our work, compare it to others and dismiss it due to imperfections. The best way to overcome this is learn to utilise our creative side. Its time to turn of the left hand side and allow yourself to draw freely, avoid rubbing out, allowing ideas to follow freely from the right hemisphere onto the paper. Do not let your critical left hand side put you of  no matter what it's saying, it can have it's say later. Once completely exhausted of ideas, go away and have a break, then come back and allow your left hand side to evaluate what you have produced, what works, what doesn't, what could be developed etc. Together your left and right along with  this design process will allow the production of creativity. 



Let It Dough, Christoph Niemann.
http://neutradesign.files.wordpress.com

 
Christoph Niemann's Let it Dough is one example of the two sides of the brain working together. The simple use of dough, cutters and sprinkles to creates shapes, people, animals and and objects is something we have all probably done as a child. This indicates the right brain working as this is a simplistic material and the things created are childlike and playful. The lack of rigidity and attention to detail in the images also suggest this. The left brain will then have evaluated what has been produced, for example associating the ball of dough as looking like the earth and thus creating the story of creations in a dough version. As well as creating the link between what has been produced in dough and the captions created, the left hemisphere will have also organised the order of the series in Let it Dough.
This is supposed to be a critical commentary and therefore we are supposed to avoid say things 'like I this' etc but I do love Christoph Niemann's Let it Dough and if you wish to see the full version follow this link;http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/let-it-dough/