We all own at least one smartphone. We often use it to make phone calls or send text messages. Maybe we take a few snapshots or watch short tutorials. However, smartphones are also great tools for creative processes and their documentation. Smartphones are multifunctional devices that can capture creativity and art, but also be means to generate creativity.

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A smartphone is always at hand

Working with children's books or network maps in a course or doing a community placemaking project opens room for unexpected situations in- and outside a classroom. There might emerge interesting discussions or artistic products that unfold their full effect in one moment. The impressions gained in this way can be used after the actual artistic process to reflect critically on it and to stimulate further creative processes or to reach people outside the classroom with interesting massages. The recording of a seminar in which groups work with children's books for example could become the starting point for an analysis of recorded stereotypes and stimulate further reflections. Leaving the university classroom, smartphones can also be used to take pictures of the environment or record personal impressions outside the university and discuss them in the group. Discrimination, e.g. on advertisements, can be captured with the camera and thus preserved for other seminar participants. In such moments, it is less important to carry a professional equipment than to be spontaneous and have a chance to react quickly. The smartphone is always at hand and always ready to capture impressions and messages over different mediums. However, one should take privacy issues of participants into account and ask for permission.

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A smartphone offers different ways for notes and records

Nowadays smartphones with their technical possibilities are offering both high-class technical recorders and enough storage space even for bigger data volumes. In this sense, an ordinary smartphone is not only a device to make simple notes, take pictures or to record audio or film sequences, but with the adequate application it can be edited at once and become a real working place. Writing of short texts, gathering of pictures or cutting a film is absolutely no problem.

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A smartphone connects with other people, projects and digital public

Using the smartphone for recording and processing films offers many opportunities for sharing material or massages in a working group, with joint projects or public. Every smartphone has an internet-connection so you are always online and able to exchange with people all over the world. On the one hand that’s important, if you want to coordinate your common working process, on the other hand its easy access to social media platforms can be a good chance to reach the community or even decision makers.

The manifold possibilities of digital communication offer connection possibilities for all kind of projects and the possibilities seem endless. So be creative and use your smartphone in creative moments!