At the core of ideating, we think of the possible directions our projects could go. The goal of this stage is to be generating a number of free ideas and developing an actionable problem statement. Naivety, pitching, and dreaming in this stage are not negative effects on the project, but the fundamental creativity needed for projects to soar.
Right now, I want to play with free-flowing ideas that interest me. My passion and my drive to do a creative project lies in poetry, so, poetry will be the central theme that I’m mind-mapping from. I ask the questions: what ideas for creative projects can come off poetry? How might I begin to make something? Using the rules of FEFO (Fail Early, Fail Often) is helpful in this stage as it allows for room to make mistakes in the generation of ideas. This maximises our freedom to ideate, and we correct ourselves early. Also, from FEFO we have a clearer direction of where we want to go through the process of eliminating ideas, but enough about that. In this stage, I must not get ahead of myself and focus purely on idea GENERATION, GENERATION, GENERATION! No evaluations yet.
In ideating, I seriously considered a Poetry YouTube channel: an abundance of original videos showing performance poetry (of myself and local Wollongong poets), or a sit-down vlog channel reviewing Button Poetry videos, or videos reacting to them. I had never been a fan of poetry blogging or poetry essays delivered onto a blog, but was keen to find my groove within both avenues. It was relating to poetry content, after all.
I’ve developed one of my ideas here to be my 241 DA – Audience Essays for Spoken Word Poetry. But before I did that, its idea stemmed from the 114 world. I found particular interest in writing essays that reflected the biggest YouTube Poetry platform, Button Poetry. Instead of a one-line YouTube comment, I wanted to go deep, describing the personal effects of the poetry performances, and also what the messages delivered meant for social justice education.
I think it would be interesting for someone involved in the Australian poetry scene (me, haha) to comment on the climate and culture of slam competitions and spoken word nights. I also like to just write and tell people my opinion, which is also a part of being a poet. Poetry opinion pieces would be cool too!
In podcasting, I considered an hour-long ‘poetry and friends’ model, interviewing local artists and poets I’m acquainted with. I would have had Zoom conferences stretching from the South and North coasts, all over Greater Sydney, some of middle America and a touch of New Zealand. Podcasting really intrigued me, and still does, especially as an open forum to have real, flowing conversations. For those reasons, podcasting can perfectly accommodate big topics such as mental health, social justice and social reform, which go hand in hand with new-age poetry. Getting poet friends (over Zoom, of course) for a performance podcast would have been amazing too. Central Coast poet, Will Small’s ‘Poetic Beings Podcast’ was a massive inspiration of mine as I was looking into the world of poetry and podcasting. I haven’t shut down the idea of a poetry podcast for my future endeavours, and it excites me to think about developing ideas around it.
I have developed the problem statement: My users needs poetry and short stories because it encourages feelings of wholeness, nostalgia and is a positive contribution to their lives.
From my experience in spoken word poetry, I know that the problem of social disconnection and loneliness exists. With these issues in mind, I could make an Instagram poetry account that brings together people with meaningful stories. I could go about this by creating heartfelt poetry and posting it. This project will help me move towards a career in the arts and making the world a more loving, kinder place. Thank you to the Travis Wall Project Starter.
I heavily reference my ideating stage in my DA pitch. There, I discuss my aim: “Being a fan myself, I know ‘Insta poetry’ is adored, demanded and easily accessible to its audience. I aim to create poetry posts, inspired from my 5-year-old spoken-word background, that comforts, confronts, educates and evokes emotions from a special nostalgia. In a small way, I want to connect to people through stories and observational poems that grapple with the human experience – ultimately, for a less lonely experience during the lengthy NSW lockdown.”
I really believe projects stemming off of poetry are more than good for people. Stories affirm that we have meaningful lives, and our connection with people is essential to our being. To make people feel all the things is the goal. An example of the world-famous Instapoet, Rupi Kaur:
And look at that like count! ^
I decided to make a playlist to catch the exact *vibe* of my poetic ideas:
In the first journeying weeks (1-4), I blasted through the ideating stage quickly and had the skeleton of my ‘Insta poetry‘ account running, and GENERATING a baby amount of interactions. I knew I wanted to be anonymous and disconnected from the account so I could best an emotional writer without the onlookers of people that “social-media-know-me”. I was first ‘@backpackerlovepoetry’ which sounded horrendous in a ‘look at me, I travel’ kind of way. I’ve settled since with ‘@2000slovepoetry’ which mainly stems from my birth year and still, my ever-romantic feelings about life.
As much as the ideating stage is important, I had an early overwhelming sense of where I was going and what I wanted to do in the beginning. I really wanted to get ahead. If I was to repeat the process, in the first weeks I would have expanded my avenues past poetry and into arts, sports and technology worlds. I would have wanted to be so open-minded that I would have mind-mapped Ash Barty’s road to success or wrote NutriBullet reviews. One of them would have taken off.
I’m lucky that in the bones of my project, ‘instapoetry’ is FIST (fast, inexpensive, simple and tiny). My poems come straight from my journal (which I write in daily), and I don’t have to pay an artist fee (haha). With AdobeSpark (for free!), it takes me about 10 minutes to edit my film camera/poetry combo perfectly to my liking. I’m very precise and picky about the aesthetic, which doesn’t speak to the projects complexity but more so to my standards. So: Instagram, my written content and the platforms I use to edit and publish are all free. There is no cost in this project, other than if I decide later on to promote on Instagram for a small fee. Is it simple and time effective? Yes, that’s why I can do it. I plaster stories onto photos or plain colours and it looks so effortless and pretty!
I’d like to think the poems have a big heart but for methodically running the page, it’s a perfect tiny project for one person.
The positive feedback early on allowed me to realise that my vision was working and encouraged me to continue on, knowing people would like it! The more positive reinforcement I received, the more confident I became at sharing meaningful and personal stories.
Ideating should be taken seriously because instead of stabbing through the dark, blind: mind-mapping and exploring freely brings the skeleton of a project to light – if we realise it or not. Ideating doesn’t narrow, but expands our potential to create and succeed. It shows us the big picture. And remember, ideating is about the generation of ideas over evaluation, any day. FEFO! FIST!
References:
En.wikipedia.org. 2021. Instapoetry – Wikipedia. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instapoetry>.
http://traviswall.online/projectstarter/
Instagram.com. 2021. Rupi Kaur’s Instagram Post: “page 109 #thesunandherflowers”. [online] Available at: <https://www.instagram.com/p/CS-d9X2scJX/>.
Mitew, T., 2021. Lecture. BCM 114 – Ideating. University of Wollongong
Small, W., 2020. Poetic Beings Podcast. [online] Lead By Story. Available at: <https://www.leadbystory.com.au/poeticbeings>.
Youtube.com. 2021. [online] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/c/ButtonPoetry>.
Williams, R., 2021. Blossoming @2000slovepoetry. [online] internet kid. Available at: <https://poetryinthestreets.video.blog/2021/08/23/blossoming-2000slovepoetry/>.
internet kid 