Rod Judkins - Ideas Are Your Only Currency

Rod Judkins is an accomplished lecturer at Central St Martins, one of the worlds pre-eminent art schools whose alumni ranging from artists like Lucien Freud, Gilbert & George and Antony Gormley through to the designers Stella McCartney, Sarah Burton and Alexander McQueen have helped shape our culture. Judkins has lectured on the subject of creativity at universities and to businesses around the world. He blogs at Psychology Today , and also acts as a consultant to numerous private companies. Trained at The Royal College of Art, he has exhibited at galleries including Tate Britain, The National Portrait Gallery and The Royal Academy. His first book, Change Your Mind: 57 Ways to Unlock Your Creative Potential , was published in 2013 by Hardie Grant. His second book The Art of Creative Thinking was published by Sceptre in 2015.

Id like to thank my daughter, Scarlet Judkins for designing all the layouts for the rough draft, suggesting ideas and helping to design the composition of the pages. Zelda Malan for her honest and therefore invaluable criticism of the exercises and for suggesting improvements to the layouts, illustrations and alternative exercises. A remarkable and original creative thinker, she promotes idea thinking at Kingston University and has been a huge influence on the book. Thanks to Louis Judkins for being the model for many of the illustrations and for his opinions on the projects.

Thanks to Drummond, my editor at Sceptre for commissioning the book and for all his support, enthusiasm, suggestions and ideas. Craig Burgesss art direction really polished up the book and helped create the look and feel I was searching for. Im grateful to the team at Sceptre for creating the cover.

Thanks to my agent Jonathan Conway for all his support and belief in this book. Im grateful to Jonathan for extracting the title, Ideas Are Your Only Currency , from the text in my first draft of the book.

Thanks to my colleagues and students at the universities where I work for their generosity in suggesting occasional lines and ideas too numerous to mention them all here but The School of Life, Central Saint Martins, University College London, City Lit and The London College of Fashion deserve a special thanks.

The line, C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhuser Gate, is quoted from the film Blade Runner . You gotta say yes to another excess is a quote from Yello.

All illustrations by Rod Judkins

THE ART OF CREATIVE THINKING

Ideas are your only currency
NOW ITS TIME TO INVEST.

DRAW THE CONTENTS OF YOUR MIND NOW.

Do you control technology or does it control you? We make technology and then it makes us. The flint axe, the printing press and the computer transformed our thinking. Theyre ubiquitous, so we use them thoughtlessly. You need to be aware of how they affect your thinking so you can use them and not be used by them.

The medium is the message, declared Marshall McLuhan, the great American philosopher of communication theory, in the mid-1960s. What he meant was that all media are an extension of the human senses. They expand our ability to interact with the world and alter our experience of it. The messages you or I send on social media seem important to us but what really matters is the way social media has changed our perceptions. The mechanism that drives it is sharing. This informs and empowers previously ignored communities.

Technology has widespread communal and philosophical consequences. McLuhan predicted a Global Village where technology brought humanity back to the interconnectedness of the tribal mentality. But we are more connected than he imagined. On our devices we can view emails, photos, work, videos, music and our whole life wherever we are. We get nervous if were away from our computers or our cell phones for long. When on holiday, were not on holiday. Were simply at work sitting by the pool. Were never off limits.

How do we take back control? We must upgrade our thinking and tune in to new mediums so that we can use them more effectively, and master them before they master us.

Once a new technology rolls over you, if youre not part of the steamroller, youre part of the road.

Stewart Brand

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Scientists believe we are. Originally only the fittest survived to pass on their traits. But modern man didnt need to be physically strong to survive. Reliance on technology has caused our evolutionary downfall. Limbs get feebler due to inactivity, immune systems weaken as we rely on antibiotics and were filling up with pacemakers, artificial joints and implants. Predict the future! Show us how man will devolve.

If it was possible to evolve, it was also possible to devolve, and that complex organisms could devolve into simpler forms or animals.

Ray Lankester

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CONTINUE THE DIAGRAM TO SHOW MANS DEVOLUTION

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Thats why some products become design classics like the Volkswagen Beetle, the angle poise lamp or Philippe Starcks iconic lemon squeezer, The Juicy Salif shown here. Its combination of his personal obsessions animal anatomy, space rockets and aluminium made it original and unique. What are your three strongest design influences? Use them to inspire a cheese grater design.

I dont design clothes, I design dreams.

Ralph Lauren

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DESIGN A CHEESE GRATER WITH PERSONALITY

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A coat of arms was an ancient way of identifying a family. In the twelfth century a knight dressed in armour was only recognizable by the symbols on his shield which described his background and tenets. Theyre still designed today. Bill Gates represents new technology and he needs a coat of arms.

Many people mistakenly think a new technology cancels out an old one.

Judith Martin

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DESIGN A COAT OF ARMS FOR BILL GATES

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The Stars and Stripes symbolize America. Fifty stars represent fifty states and thirteen stripes the first colonies of the union. Flags identify a geographical region but cyberspace is a new kind of territory a vast digital universe filled with infinite constellations of data, a nexus of telecommunications networks. The virtual world of the Internet is an electronic space of no substance but unimaginable complexity.

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we dont have to experience it.

Max Frisch

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DESIGN A FLAG FOR CYBERSPACE

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The prolific British inventor Arthur Pedrick is a cult figure, revered by designers because none of his impractical devices worked or were ever commercially available. Bursting with ideas, he filed a record 162 patents for an individual before he died. Their total failure never dimmed his enthusiasm. A nuclear cat flap? An underwater bicycle? Steerable golf balls? Ideas so awful they were awesome. Celebrate his attributes with a monument.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Winston Churchill

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DESIGN A MONUMENT FOR ARTHUR PEDRICK