Week 2 Post 2 - Connections and Creative Intentions

   When a product is produced by a creator, the creator's intentions for that creation are consistent with the product. The idea of "You are the record" illustrates this well. By listening to music, you should be able to feel what the intentions for its creation are, and what the artist's feelings were when creating. Intentions cannot be glossed over by immaculate production, no matter the quality of the product the intentions of the artist will be clear (did the artist create this song to make you feel a certain way, or to express emotions they were feeling, or did they create it just to make money and sell records?). Without purposeful intention, the artist will not put themselves into their work. Creators will use reduction to take away excess things that do not express their intentions. "You first learn about all the things you can do, then you learn about what you can leave out to still say exactly what you're saying." There is discipline in reducing your product to only what is absolutely needed. Creators fall in love with the problem they are trying to solve, the process of solving it, rather than the actual finished product. Creative people, during creation, start with a preliminary, low-cost version of what their final product could be, and this is called a prototype. Prototypes go through different iterations an infinite number of times until the creator decides to stop making more iterations. One way to thing about creations is that they are in a "constant beta" to describe the idea of always considering what could be better about a creation.

   Creativity is driven by purposeful intentions to produce a product that showcases those intentions. In a true creative product, the creator's intentions are clearly expressed, regardless of the subjective quality of the product. Creative intentions answer questions like these: What is my passion? Why do I care? How do I see the world? What are my values? After these answers are present in the creation, it is a good idea to reduce the mass of the creation to only enough to house these answers. Creative people "fall in love with the problem, not the solution," which is to say they care less about the final product and more about the process of making it. Prototypes of products that creators make are in a state of "permanent beta" to allow constant changes in the product to further reduce it in ways and add to it in others to achieve a better product than the last iteration.