Trash & Creativity

What is it about the backs of envelopes and cocktail napkins that inspires imagination? Maybe it’s that creativity needs freedom, and when you’re using something that was getting thrown out anyway, that’s freedom: freedom to mess up, to scribble over, to try again, to be you. I have lots of notebooks, but somehow I always grab a piece of junk mail and a pen when I have some thinking to do.

Discarded boxes, bags, and catalogs have the same magic but instead of being flat, they’re 3-D. You get to make real things. They’re trash, so anything goes:

  • You can’t waste or ruin trash.

  • You can’t run out of trash

  • Trash won’t judge your ideas

  • Trash isn’t perfect, which gets you off the hook to produce a perfect end product.

So forget about messing up, and have fun letting your ideas come out and play.

 

Thank you for reading! If you have questions, please drop me a line.