Artistic Thinking & Research

Idea generation and research is, perhaps, the most important part of developing any creative project.  In order to help students develop the skills to organize their visual lexicons, art teachers need to teach students the organizational tools they will need in order for research to work properly.  Often, teachers skip this step by making the assumption that students know how the design/creation process works, but this notion is a bit naïve.  In the past, inspirational organization may have involved images cut from magazines, or a collection of books or stories, but this is likely outdated now.  In the age of the iKid, I think it is increasingly easier for students to organize themselves because of the ease of online organizational tools.  With great sites like Pinterest, Tumblr, and others, students are looking for inspiration and storing it without really realizing that they are doing so.  I think these websites and apps, in themselves, teach organizational skills by requiring that items belong to larger categories.  Another benefit of using online organizing tools is that they are often searchable, which makes the process of finding inspiring images much easier than it has been in the past.  Students are already using most of these technologies, it is just a matter of teaching them to coherently organize their ideas through the use of categorization (from broad to a narrow scope).  By teaching students to use these tools, you are inherently showing them how to better organize their thoughts and ideas for any area of research.