The final presentation on Tuesday marks the end of my Creative Thinking module. What we did for this project was to trade with people for stuff of a higher value, starting with an Ikea pencil. Proceeded on to ask random people and friends in SMU to trade with us. On a couple of days me and Sarah even went out on the street to ask the public to trade with us, an of course we received countless rejections.
The Stating Item
Just an overview of what item we managed to exchange:
Starting item Ikea pencil
Using the Ikea pencil, we traded for S$12 worth of ringgit, rupiah and baht
->a kbox card, gutters and laser pointer
->a pair of Bone concert tix
-> a pencil box
-> a wallet
-> a calculator
-> earrings
-> a bag
...And finally a printer
Quite a series of good deal right? However, our project is not meant to earn from the exchanges but rather to see the human reactions to such requests. While doing the project didn't think too much of the grades but rather enjoy the process. How many people actually have an opportunity to approach random people on the street for these purposes? With all the experience begging and terrorizing, CT's the most fun modules I had so far. Of course there's hardwork too. Lost count of the distance me and Sarah walked around SMU and to Orchard and Bugis for this project, as well as the amount of time and effort that we put in for this project. This project also make me test the new cab midnight surcharge twice and learn how to use Adobe Premiere to edit the videos. It's usually not that difficult to do video editing but when suay-ness step in, anything can go wrong. We found so many computers that actually can't read .avi files and computers without Moviemaker and the last straw is after editing for 2hrs plus the night before, the program just close itself!!
On the actual day of presentation, we put up a static display as well. A rather different static display which look more or less like an obstacle course where we put the display under the table, hang on the ceiling etc, so the class and prof have to crawl at times to look at the charts. After which we showed the video which we did. I've uploaded the video on Youtube and here so do take a look!
The obstacle course
Think we will do well looking at how hard the class and prof laugh and commented on the presentation. Looking at others' presentations, some of them were very interesting and entertaining as well, but there was one particular group which was disastrous. Had a skit on 'should CT be abolished' and neither the topic and the presentation was interesting and it still exceeded by 20mins. The group just proved that creative thinking cannot be taught and all the hype of diversification (the group consist of 4 nationalities) is false. If I were Kirpal, I would be so sad that this is what they can present after teaching them for six weeks.
Other groups aside, I'm not that happy about my own group as well. 90% of the work is done by me and Sarah, 8% is done by our friends and only 2% is done by the other 2 group members. That's the worst free-loading I've ever seen and I wonder how people can freeload to this extent without feeling guilty. Sadly, there's no peer evaluation as well otherwise I'll file a freeloading report cause they seriously don't deserve to get the same grades as me and Sarah. Very thankful that Sarah is in my group otherwise I think I may just pull up to do up a project myself.
Overall I enjoyed this module a lot with inspirational talks by Kirpal each week and the opportunity to try creative stuffs. Get to know myself better as well in terms of my creativity ability though it's not that good to know that I can conceptualise and optimize well but can't generate new ideas and implement well. Nevertheless, that's it, CT is over and here comes my two-days-week!!!
