When I began developing the concept

When I began developing the concept for a workshop dedicated to the Smiley, I was interested not so much in the yellow circle with two eyes and a smile  an image so familiar that we have almost stopped noticing it  but in the journey it had taken before becoming part of our shared visual memory. I wanted to understand how something so simple could survive for decades, move from a corporate button onto T-shirts, posters and design objects, enter the world of art, pass through countless interpretations and collaborations, and still remain instantly recognizable to almost everyone.

The story of its creation turned out to be an almost perfect story about creativity.

In 1963, American graphic designer Harvey Ball was given a rather pragmatic task. An insurance company was going through internal changes and was looking for a way to improve employee morale. They needed something simple, positive and immediately understandable without explanation. Ball drew a yellow circle, two black eyes and a smiling mouth. According to accounts of the story, the design took him about ten minutes, and he was paid 45 dollars for it.

There is something almost comical about that amount, especially when viewed from the perspective of what this image would eventually become. I have always been fascinated  and slightly amused  by this recurring feature of the creative industries: sometimes a person creates an idea that later acquires enormous cultural or commercial value, while at the moment of its creation neither the author nor anyone around them can yet see the scale of its future life. Perhaps this is why the history of art and design so often makes us reconsider the very idea of value  who determines it, when it appears, and why sometimes it takes decades for us to recognize it.

But as I continued researching the history of the Smiley, I found myself thinking less about the 45 dollars and more about the task Harvey Ball had originally been asked to solve. At the beginning of this story, there was no intention to create a cultural icon. There was simply a problem that needed a solution. And the solution happened to be an image.

This is where, for me, the story becomes particularly interesting.

We are used to thinking about creativity as something that belongs primarily to art to artists, designers, musicians and people working in so-called creative professions. But the longer I work as an artist, and the more I observe the creative processes of others, the more convinced I become that this definition is far too narrow. To me, creativity is not so much the ability to make a beautiful object as it is the ability to discover another path between a problem and its solution.

That is why I see creativity as a skill  one that can, and perhaps should, be developed.

Creative thinking allows us to connect things that previously seemed unrelated, shift our perspective, ask different questions and find possibilities where familiar approaches no longer work. Sometimes the result of that process is a painting. Sometimes it is a business idea, a new way of communicating, a product, or a solution to an entirely ordinary problem. We may not even call it creativity, although we probably use it far more often than we realize.

Perhaps this is exactly why I wanted to bring the story of the Smiley into a children’s workshop. Not simply because children enjoy bright yellow faces  although, of course, that helps. I was interested in something else: could we take a symbol that everyone already knows and use it as an entry point into a conversation about developing an idea of one’s own?

There is a certain paradox here. We often associate creativity with the need to invent something completely new, something that has never existed before. Yet the creative process very often begins in a completely different way. We take what already exists around us, filter it through our own experience, change its context, color, scale or emotion  and at some point, something familiar stops being merely familiar.

So the purpose of the workshop was never to teach a child how to draw a Smiley. You hardly need a museum, an artist or ninety minutes for that.

What interested me much more was asking the children a different question:

What can you do with an image the whole world already knows to make it suddenly become your own?