Can you and your job survive this age of job automation? C4DI member Peter Snelling thinks so.

Digital creative, Peter Snelling is the founder of multi-award winning My Pockets – a company that specialises in making innovative and heartfelt films, digital campaigns and social art projects. He believes that the key to surviving the age of automation is by embracing creativity – something he thinks won’t easily be replaced by machines.

This week Peter kindly ran a creative workshop for members to help them unleash their creativity.

The workshop began with a deep dive into Stop Motion animation with members being tasked with creating a stop-motion monster. You can see some of the team’s handiwork via the Gif on the left.

This simple exercise was designed to achieve three things; fun, a creative experience and a foundation that would later help members understand the creative process which Peter would later go on to describe:

 We asked Peter to give us his three top tips to help make creative sessions in a team environment productive and he said:

1.) Don’t criticise too early – when generating ideas and being creative doesn’t stop the process too early – it’s important creativity is encouraged early on. Putting down an idea when your team is in a creative phase can stop the process dead.
2.) Make sure sessions are fun and playful – it’s hard to be creative when you’re totally bored
3.) Make sure you finish – make sure that you walk away from our session having completed something. In our case, it was a monster. In yours, it could be a concept, design, product idea etc. This will give your team an incentive to improve and build on what they’ve achieved in the session.

You can see Peter’s full guidelines below:

   MY POCKETS GUIDELINES FOR BEING CREATIVE

Get over your fear of the BLANK PAGE by just starting.

Give open and warm INVITATIONS for others to join in.

Don’t CRITICISE things too early. It will kill good ideas.

Making it FUN and PLAYFUL

Get up and DO it.

Place a TIME LIMIT on activities to keep them moving.

Once you have an idea you think is strong give it a kicking CRITICISE it.

Look for ideas that are MEANINGFUL, RELEVANT to people and tell a STORY.

FINISH things to make way for something else or a new evolution of something old.  

To find out more visit mypockets.co.uk