In the month of March, 2009, Carla went on a trip to Barcelona, Spain to complete a 4 month internship at Estudio Mariscal.

During the 5 months she was abroad Carla also completed a semester of her Honours degree in Melbourne via correspondence. One requirement of the semesters work was an illustrated weekly update on her thoughts and experinces over 9 weeks.

Here are a selection of those thoughts.
Theye were often used as a medium for Carla to improve her Spanish.

WEEK 9

WEEK 8

WEEK 7

WEEK 6

WEEK 5

WEEK 4

WEEK 3

WEEK 2
 

WEEK 1

All this reading on ’space’ and creating within space obviously gets you thinking about your own space and trying to assess which elements could be improved or changed. Or the reasons why it is so productive.

From all this potential thinking i have realised my space at Mariscal (both psychological and physical) leaves me in a fairly unique position. I would even go as far as to say it is the most productive creative space ive ever had the chance to work in. To explain better:

First of all there is the physical aspects of the space, which although beautiful and relaxing it is not necessarily unique. Then there is the language issue, which is smaller by the day but keeps me within a certain state of focus which i wouldn’t have anywhere else. I am without the opportunity to chatter (as I do) and distract myself constantly with others activities such as youtube and conversation.

Then there is the lack of expectation. I don’t have the presure of someone relying on me to be creative, I’m not getting paid here, so there are no expectations of quality of thought, and to be honest the work im involved with isnt exactly ‘creative thinking’ of sorts. This leaves me able to think about what I like exactly how I want, with no stress of time and no judgment at the end. With all these qualities and the experience of being in a different country and well as the constant stimulation of learning a new language (to keep the brain moving) there seems to be nothing that could be improved about the situation. Even the lack of money is a benefit because im not distracting myself with consumerist opportunities.

Daria Loi – RMIT University, Australia
Patrick Dillon – Exeter University, UK

Cambridge Journal of Education – Vol. 36, No. 3, September 2006, pp. 363–381

- Creativity, like any other human activity, is situationally dependent.

- Systems are characterized by both stasis and change. To give an ecological example, on a daily basis a woodland accommodates a myriad of small changes to its constituent plant and animal populations, but remains recognizably woodland unless the forces of change are so great that they override the mechanism that maintain the status quo (see below). A stimulus to change a system is called a ‘disturbance’ and the response of the system a ‘perturbation’: these are ecological terms and do not fit comfortably with sociocultural situations. We may however think of a disturbance as an ‘intervention’. Interventions may arise out of properties of the system itself, as part of its internal dynamics, such as day-to-day organizational and maintenance matters. Interventions may also be designed— deliberate interventions undertaken by one or more of the participants to trigger a particular outcome.

- interventions have to be profound enough to overcome negative feedback.

- For Deikman (1973) the active mode dominates the receptive mode due to the value placed on biological survival. The receptive mode is functional during infancy and the developmental preference for the action mode has made society consider it as the proper (or ordinary) mode, while there is a tendency to think that the more unusual receptive modes are pathological or regressive.

- This is personalization in the sense of individuals having greater influence over both choice and utilization of learning resources.

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