Pantheon of Wonder

Essay

Abstraction of Colorful Light

Top 5 Ways to Grow Design Creativity In the Next Year

by Maria Lorena Lehman

Design Creativity

Architecture Drawing

As an environmental designer, it is ever important to lift your work to the next level. This means that you never settle into a design process plateau where creative growth remains stagnant. And as you work to inject multi-sensory design into your architectural creations, you keep your design vision, decision-making, and communication skills at their peak levels. This is why I created the following top 5 list of best ways to grow your design creativity in the year ahead…

  • Practice Creative Thinking Daily: Journal about your design projects by not only sketching, but also by writing about how to make them better. Great ideas are born while writing.

  • Schedule Brainstorming Sessions: Plan time within your design process to think of many possible solutions to a design challenge. Then, you can choose the best solution, or combine great ideas from various solutions into a super-solution.

  • Switch Design Tools: Use a different design tool to help you think differently about a design challenge and its solution. For example, if you use computers to create 3D still visualizations, then try creating a 3D animation of your design – or use a different kind of modeling software to generate the geometric forms.

  • Conduct a Portfolio Review: Analyze your previous projects within your portfolio with a strategic eye. Ask yourself: How can I make my next project even better? What has been missing from my previous designs that if I included in my next design, would bring my work to a heightened, greater, level?

  • Determine Your WHY: Spend some time figuring out why you do the work you do. By getting a deeper understanding into your purpose, you will unlock a more creative purpose for your design work that will resonate with clients and future building occupants.

Really, creativity is a practice that you must engage in to strengthen your design skills. While working on design projects, you pull from your creative skillset – but you also must grow creativity as you progress and advance as a designer over the longer term. Creativity is an important part of multi-sensory design, and is one that must be developed if one is to formulate extraordinary design concepts.

Image Credit: © www_slon_pics | Pixabay

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Your invitation:


Dear reader,


I believe life is a continual process of awakening. As the journey of my own life continues, I always find myself connecting my experiences, studies, and ideas to new creative projects that bring beauty, inspiration, and hope for our world. For over 30 years, since starting at age 17, I have immersed myself in architectural design; and early on, I earned a Master of Design with Distinction from Harvard University, setting the foundation for decades of deep immersion in the field. Yet even before this, I held music close to my heart. At the age of 5, I began my first piano lessons; and since then, I began to see the world through a musical lens — even while designing architecture.


Over the decades, I grew closer and closer to music with a deep love for the design of instruments, their unique timbres, and for all the immersive ways their sounds could be interwoven into beautiful orchestrated compositions. I even began to develop a musical composition methodology, Spatial Symphonics, as I found my architectural design work becoming more and more emotive, soul-stirring, and yes: musical.


In recent years, I finally turned my focus to music composition. I hold a Graduate Diploma from the Film Scoring Academy of Europe where my works have been recorded by the acclaimed European Recording Orchestra (ERO), and I am founder of MLL ATELIER® — an award-winning studio now dedicated to my work as an orchestral composer, recording artist, and spatial symphonist — where I advance architectural design through music, and innovate music through an architectural design lens.


It is my hope that I can share my ongoing musical-design journey with you, directly from my studio through my video-newsletter entitled 'Orchestral Notes'. Expect video updates filled with first-access studio news announcing: album/book releases, concert premiers, sheet music publications, creative process sneak-peeks, and my own compositional philosophies as they develop to fuel my ongoing body of musical and architectural authorial works.


I would love for you to join me for this exciting adventure.


Simply click the button below to join my Orchestral Notes video-newsletter delivered every two weeks directly to your email inbox. Plus, get access to the full publication archives.

JOIN THE ORCHESTRAL NOTES NEWSLETTER

Let’s enjoy the beauty, inspiration, and hope that music brings.


Thank you for joining me on this wondrous journey.


Warmly,

Maria Lorena Lehman


Founder of MLL ATELIER® | Orchestral Notes

Your invitation:


Dear reader,


I believe life is a continual process of awakening. As the journey of my own life continues, I always find myself connecting my experiences, studies, and ideas to new creative projects that bring beauty, inspiration, and hope for our world. For over 30 years, since starting at age 17, I have immersed myself in architectural design; and early on, I earned a Master of Design with Distinction from Harvard University, setting the foundation for decades of deep immersion in the field. Yet even before this, I held music close to my heart. At the age of 5, I began my first piano lessons; and since then, I began to see the world through a musical lens — even while designing architecture.


Over the decades, I grew closer and closer to music with a deep love for the design of instruments, their unique timbres, and for all the immersive ways their sounds could be interwoven into beautiful orchestrated compositions. I even began to develop a musical composition methodology, Spatial Symphonics, as I found my architectural design work becoming more and more emotive, soul-stirring, and yes: musical.


In recent years, I finally turned my focus to music composition. I hold a Graduate Diploma from the Film Scoring Academy of Europe where my works have been recorded by the acclaimed European Recording Orchestra (ERO), and I am founder of MLL ATELIER® — an award-winning studio now dedicated to my work as an orchestral composer, recording artist, and spatial symphonist — where I advance architectural design through music, and innovate music through an architectural design lens.


It is my hope that I can share my ongoing musical-design journey with you, directly from my studio through my video-newsletter entitled 'Orchestral Notes'. Expect video updates filled with first-access studio news announcing: album/book releases, concert premiers, sheet music publications, creative process sneak-peeks, and my own compositional philosophies as they develop to fuel my ongoing body of musical and architectural authorial works.


I would love for you to join me for this exciting adventure.


Simply click the button below to join my Orchestral Notes video-newsletter delivered every two weeks directly to your email inbox. Plus, get access to the full publication archives.

JOIN ORCHESTRAL NOTES

Limited availability each month.


Warmly,

Maria Lorena Lehman


Founder of MLL ATELIER

Author of PANTHEON OF WONDER

Maria Lorena Lehman has received the following awards and has been seen in the following publications: