joining the dots
i never much liked doing dot-to-dots as a child – too predictable. but as adult playing dot-to-dot with real life is fantastic fun – i now find excitement in that hinted-at picture the lines will soon create.
and in a moment of rare self-reflection i’ve twigged that a certain amount of what we do at electric angel is joining the dots. as creatives we look for visual, textual, social and psychological links. when these dots, usually born of conversation, are joined you create a web of ideas for a ‘design’ – usually joining the dots also reveals which delivery methods are going to be most valuable. i think we’ve discovered our design theory.
real life dot-to-dot is the same but with people, places and situations and we now find ourselves doing this too.
at present some of this is done outside our sphere of paid work – a tiny example is when we joined the dots of jan niedojadlo’s scultpture, the alt.worship movement [something he'd previously not heard of], ben edson and greenbelt festival. and hey presto, jan exhibited at greenbelt this last bank holiday weekend. and that’s cool – it’s nice to help make things happen.
but – using this blog as thoughtspace for a moment – how do we promote dot-to-dot as part of the electric angel service? some of the organisations we have long term relationships with already use us in this way – they’ll buy our time and use it to throw ideas around for a project. we love to work like that.
in some senses it’s not revolutionary – this is how many great ideas in the world start out, and when people haven’t looked for the dots it’s why they’ve failed. but there’s a certain thought process that enables it to happen and we [the electric angel posse] need to recognise that that’s part of what we do and offer it as such. it’s partly what we’re hinting at with the ‘design for life’ tag – this is about more than ink on paper. i’ll post more dot-to-dots as they happen as i believe they’re now as much part of our portfolio as, say, a poster design.
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