As a child I sure got my daily bath of creativity. What did you expect of the third child of a designer/artist/poet and a part-time art teacher/full-time mum. I felt a bit like Obelix who fell into the kettle of magic potion.
Already as a toddler, my dad took me along to the 100% experience-oriented arts classes he taught children. There I made my first – very abstract – oil painting, screen-printed T-shirt and linocut. Sometimes we took the train to the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. I still have a picture somewhere of me, sitting on my bruised knees, coloured pencil in my mouth, doing my version of a huge Rembrandt.
Each time I could go along to my dad’s office, I was overexcited. The walls were filled with sketches of mysterious new designs and I could play with the latest polystyrene (or ‘piepschuim’ as we called it) prototypes as if they were spaceships. Meanwhile somewhere in the 70s, back home, my mum gave lessons spinning, wool dyeing, weaving… Surrounded by all those busy ladies, she also taught me the magic of turning wool into thread. I could hardly believe my eyes when I admired all beautiful shades of coloured wool hanging out to dry in between the willow trees in our garden.
Colour, shape, the omnipresence of aesthetics, the gratification you get from creating... oh yes, I grew up in a world where everything was believed to be feasible, if you set your mind and creativity to it. The little seed was planted and was growing wild.
I grew to be a ‘curious’ little girl, in every sense of the word, absorbing new things like a sponge, a ‘wiebelgat’ the schoolteachers tried to calm down, not with extra inspiration but with extra math exercises. Luckily for me, I got all the stimulation I needed at home. My first invention, a clock without hands, got a standing ovation and instead of ‘Martine goes shopping’ Santa brought me ‘The Art of Colour’ by Johannes Itten, a book on colour theory. Yippee! On other occasions, I was hiding for hours underneath my mum’s working table, going through her Letraset books, inventing dozens of new typefaces.
And while my high school classmates were dreaming of becoming a doctor or a lawyer (or at least marrying one) I took the road less travelled, straight to Antwerp. My Product Development studies finally felt like coming home to a place filled with soul mates who appreciated my creativity potion overdose.
After having started working, I kept itching for more knowledge, for a broader view. So this ‘curieuzeneus’ studied on in her spare time and became a product developer with a marketing background, a graduated eye in photography holding a degree in business management and typography.
The more this combination of viewpoints broadened my own scope, the clearer it became that the power of real solutions laid in connecting the dots between disciplines, instead of what the market was doing, i.e. breaking everything down in separate jobs, putting everyone in boxes. So I tumbled from one job into another, never feeling complete. Job descriptions felt like straightjackets and assignments were never challenging enough.
However, creating, shaping, designing and finding smart, integrated solutions are the fuel that makes my motor run, the oxygen that makes my heart beat. So some years back, my engine started to sputter. Quite a long period of resting, reflecting and reenergising followed. With ups and downs, I slowly came to the conclusion that – instead of finding the job I fitted in – I needed to take my own energy, my own creative DNA as a starting point to find what makes me tick.
It all comes down to passion and creativity, both of which are hard (or impossible) to squeeze into a one-line definition. What I do, feels more like a reflex, a way of looking at things, of tackling a challenge. So what I had been doing very intuitively over all those years proved to be my own method, my me -thod.
First I ask questions, then I listen carefully, with an open mind and a big heart, which enables me to ask better questions and to end up with the real insights. Next I combine my passionate curiosity with creative and analytic thinking to come up with smart solutions. These are tested and tweaked until I get it right. Idea, form and function now are one. One seamless story. One powerful, smart, innovative and human-centered solution that feels right. Because the client recognises himself in it with a smile and because I feel it makes my heart beat a bit faster.