By Saphire Favell

Gettin’ sticky.

For the past few weeks we’ve been working on portfolio briefs. Finally… the heat is turning up, and I can feel it. Longer days in the studio, longer nights working at home, and our minds totally and weirdly consumed by pensions and life insurance. Riveting right? Absolutely, believe it or not.

Not only are we grasping the ins and outs of dire but valuable subjects we’re also starting to really put into practice all the techniques we’ve learnt thus far. 6 hat thinking, persona’s, sticky tests, lateral thinking techniques, 600 ideas a minute, the art of getting into playful child mode, the confidence to voice your opinion to your partner and crit work and in turn listen to their advice and constructive criticism. Creativity is a bloody process – never a truer word. It just about learning the ropes… and we are all getting there.

Surprisingly I’ve actually found talking to the other students more beneficial for this particular project than speaking to the mentors. Bouncing ideas and asking them if they understand our concept. But this may be because some psycho kept rubbing everyone’s names off the list so it was hard nailing down a mentor. Felt like I was in Pacman. Awks.

In regards to mentors I guess I expected a little more hand holding as I struggled to know which idea/advice to run with and which to pie off. In retrospect I was definitely annoying during this PB continuously asking for help/advice (sorry Dusty lol) but what I DID learn from it all after is to literally go with your gut instinct and ask for advice on how to improve your idea rather then ask what they would do. Because everyone is different!

After all you have to make work that you believe in.

You also have to believe in your partners. I was lucky to be working with Tedj and Patxi. Truth be known I was a little anxious at first… I was afraid the ideas wouldn’t come so easily as I hadn’t really spoken to the boys much. And yes, even though we went through millions of ideas, over 400 propositions (no joke), headaches and walks to ‘clear our heads’ we ended up something that we were all semi proud of. And the best bit? We laughed. A lot. And I mean a lot. Even Dean said that whenever he’d look around to all of us we were giggling. That means something was going right, right? A good sign that we’re starting to embrace playful child mode. A gold star for you.

And in terms of time management we did rather well, with time to spare before the deadline. A first and, hopefully, not the last.

Yes, ok, our idea was quite stupid and not that well crafted and we hadn’t thought about how much further we can push the idea etc etc etc… but on reflection of PB2 the most valuable lesson I learnt is to have fun. And trust in your idea.. even if others say not to.

Just do you.