Video: Kyna Leski on Creative Processes

Author: Colleen Kaman
Posted: 05/05/10 18:05 UTC
Info: Bio
Tags: 2009, creative, process, Design, Architecture

At PopTech 2009, architect and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) professor Kyna Leski spoke about the craft of architecture as an art form:

Leski encourages her students to pull away from assumptions about the creative process and instead learn to develop their own artistic sensibility by “knowing the world.” This occurs, Leski suggests, through the acts of gathering, seeing, and grasping.

During her talk, Leski spoke about an exercise she had her students do: taking a painting by Paul Klee and had them build the third dimension of the image using only white glue and white museum board. One student assigned height to the gradations of color so that his project, when held up to the light, closely resembled the work of Paul Klee.

Leski used this example to introduce her understanding of the creative process, suggesting that it relies on the process of discovery. For more on Leski’s teaching, you can check out her recent book, called The Making of Design Principles, which explores the first semester design studio at RISD.

As part of her teaching, Leski has expressed her “Ground Rules for Navigating the Creative Process.” These include:

- The creative process hold internal guides for a project’s development and guides an individual’s growth as well.
- Only by committing yourself to the authority of the work can you develop as artists.
- There is a power to limits.
- The whole cannot be seen from a single point of view.
- Words are essential to developing a consciousness of the creative process … an intimate felt experience of a “material language.”
- Everything is connected, somehow, from the astronomical to the metabolic.

These principles suggest an avenue for thinking about the impact of design throughout our lives.
What design principles do you think guide your view of the world?