Activity 1 — Your Creative Contribution Profile

Time: about 45 minutes. Submit: online text, or a photo of handwritten pages. 

This first activity sets up everything that follows. Write it by hand if you can — it is slower, and slower is harder to be dishonest in. 

Part A — The Thirty. Run the exercise from the lesson on any everyday object. Submit your full list, including the bad ideas, and add two sentences on what you noticed happening between item 10 and item 25. 

Part B — Your profile. Six questions, honest answers, no modesty and no exaggeration: 

1. What am I good at? Include things that do not feel like skills — organising people, noticing what is missing, being funny, staying calm. 
2. What do I enjoy creating? Enjoyment predicts what you will still be doing in week nine. 
3. What knowledge do I bring? Lived experience, a language, a technical skill, knowing how a system works, knowing what people your age actually watch. 
4. What perspective do I bring? Where you are from, what you have lived, what you notice that others do not. Often your most valuable contribution and the one you are least likely to name. 
5. What would I like to learn? 
6. How could I contribute to a creative team? One or two concrete sentences. 

Finish by naming which two or three of the eight creative capacities are most yours. 

Part C — Your issue. Name the social issue you cannot stop noticing — not the one you think you should care about. One paragraph on why it has your attention. 

You will use this issue as practice material through the whole course. Nothing you design has to be built. Choose something you will still find interesting in six weeks. 

Creative Contribution Profile

Lesson 1. Keep this. It is what you bring into any team you ever join, and it is worth updating once a year. 

The eight creative capacities: visual creativity · storytelling · problem solving · technological creativity · social creativity · strategic thinking · communication · community building

Mine are: ________________________