Ruby Matthews

Cultivating Creative Curiosity

Today, modern work environments and performance-driven cultures leave little space for slowing down, noticing, and nurturing curiosity in everyday life through participatory action and reflection. My project responded to this issue by exploring how analog processes, hands-on making, and illustrative narratives, like storytelling, tactile prompts, and structured experimental play, could become tools that made curiosity more accessible and, in turn, celebrated the creative process over product. Guiding my main medium of the storybook and my first activation of the pocketbook were methods such as visual storytelling, iterative prototyping, and interactive activities, which aimed to support the user in an immersive experience. A Spark of Noticing drew on core contextual ideas from slow design benefits, play as a way of exploring, and the value of analogue resources as a counter to digital habits. It strived to contribute to the field by showing how communication design could support curiosity as an open and ongoing process, encouraging mindful engagement and joy in making, which are both essential for creative sustainability.