Written by Gavin
|
29 November 2010
Well we've arrived at the end of the semester. Taking full advantage of the recent Thanksgiving holiday, I took the entire week off from schoolwork. That's not to say that I took the week off from creativity, but I allowed it to be random rather than structured as have been other Transformative Practices over the semester. I completely abandoned any daily reporting, drawings, anything. To me, it was time to take the training wheels off and pursue free association of ideas and creativity without structure.
Fortunately, I stumbled upon random creative moments to contribute well to our final collaborative project. Rather than a bunch of individual entries this time, I'm going to sum everything of the past week or two in one large entry.
From my years of work experience, I'm a brand guy. I can create, design and implement a marketable brand. In fact, I often create logos, graphics, and websites just for potential business ideas. I use these as tangible samples that physically represent an already operational business. That way, it seems like an already functioning business that I can then take a look at and "back-build". Immediately, I begin to think about what's missing, what I've left out, what other pieces are needed to prop up the structures I've made virtually or graphically.
Taking this approach, our team had met prior to break and decided to pursue some sort of Outdoor Fitness Theme-Park idea. I don't know the first thing about theme parks, but I do know how to take keywords and brand them.
"Outdoor" | "Fitness" | "Park"
I also remembered the humor we all shared in talking about zebras (and the fact that, without much capital investment, we might face having to paint black and white stripes on horses and call them zebras!). It's a theme that just stuck, even though it was a bit outlandish. Yet, it inspired me to look for zebra print graphics one day between classes. I located this artwork (below):
From this discovery, I decided to pursue creating a logo for our concept. Remember, it's still a high-level concept. But I kept thinking...
"Outdoor" | "Park" | "Zebra" | "Animals" | "Fitness"
"Adventure" | "Jungles" | "Zoo"
Then I remembered that we wanted these parks easily accessible. I thought, how about in the middle of a city instead of out in the middle of nowhere like most theme parks are today. Then I thought "rural" vs. "urban". The word Urban stuck. Then came the popular phrase "urban jungle"....then....this was born (below):
There it was...the name, the logo, the zebra reference....all rolled into a handy little logo. Just looking at this inspires further thought. What makes it an "urban jungle"? How can we fulfill the promise of "adventure"? What is a "Fit-Park" and what specific activities make it so? Given "jungle" is an "environment", how do we make it eco-friendly and sustainable?
The questions keep flooding, and our group meeting at Krankie's will help fill in the details. In fact, I think there may be a way to incorporate my prototype idea from TP5 ("Storebox") into this.
