The Inspiration Walk Hone your ability to spark imagination and strengthen your creative confidence. 

In just 15 minutes, you will have collected inspiration for something you care about and discovered a thing or two about your own creative practice.

  • Develop Your Design Work
  • Educators
  • Professionals
  • Tool
  • Find inspiration on a challenge that matters to you.

    The Inspiration Walk is an immersive audio learning experience designed to help you see things differently. It's an exercise in observation and synthesis that gets your body and mind moving into unexpected territory. 

    Use this activity on your own or with a big group to practice paying attention to the world around you and to use your environment as a source of inspiration. This activity helps to hone the skills of observation and synthesis and to show the power of changing one’s perspective.

    How does it work?

    The Inspiration Walk takes about 15 minutes and we recommend doing it in an outdoor space with some natural elements in it (trees, flowers, etc). All you need is a mobile device connected to the internet to stream audio, plus earbuds, a notebook, and a pen. You will be guided throughout the entire experience but will choose your own path. At the end of the 15 minutes, you will have collected inspiration for something you care about and discovered a thing or two about your own creative practice.

    The activity

    Step 1: Make sure you have what you need. The Inspiration Walk is a guided audio experience that takes place outdoors, preferably in an environment with natural elements. Carve out 35-40 minutes to allow for setup, the walk, and a group debrief. Each participant needs a mobile device connected to the internet that can stream audio, earplugs, a notebook, and a pen. And of course, whatever clothing they need to spend the next 15 minutes outside.

    If streaming audio is not an option, participants can download audio to their devices before they start.  

    Step 2: Introduce the walk and send out participants. Setup the Inspiration Walk as an immersive, individual audio experience used to practice your creative muscles.

    Step 3: Go for a walk. Ask participants to make sure they have all materials needed (see above) and ask them to pull out their mobile devices and navigate to this page. 

    From here, they’ll be able to stream the Inspiration Walk.

    Once they’ve pulled up the page, tell them to plug in their earplugs, grab their notebook and pen, and go outside. Once outside, they hit play. Once participants hit play, all instructions for what to do next are in the audiotrack.

    Each participant will end up in a different location based on the choices they make along the way. Make sure they know how to get back to the location where you’re meeting up after the experience.

    Step 4: Debrief. Decide what you want the debrief to focus on:

    The content: the act of changing your perspective, finding inspiration, and applying it to a creative challenge (most teams will pick this).

    The format: the act of learning through an immersive learning audio experience (suitable for educators or education students). A common debrief structure we recommend has three layers: What? So what? Now what?

     

    Related Resources

    Getting Unstuck

     

    Credits

    Tania Anaissie, Erik Olesund, Seamus Yu Harte, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Hannah Joy Root

     

    LICENSE: CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-SHAREALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL