Mind, body and the metaverse

Why making shapes with your body helps to shape new ideas:

a radical approach to creativity for marketing in the metaverse 

By Roxanne Kingsman, Account Director

It’s fascinating seeing the creative opportunities surrounding Web3 and NFTs. It seems like an arena for art and technology to truly collide and the investment into the metaverse by big brands only looks to increase. Whilst the ‘metaverse’ is being built, brands are increasing their presence in existing online worlds, like Gucci’s town in Roblox’s platform. Online platforms are one big playground for brands and creators to explore with concepts they can take into the metaverse.

As we try to look ahead and explore the possibilities of what Web3 might hold, I’m intrigued by what enables people to create something truly original. Already, we’re seeing people confuse gaming and virtual reality with the metaverse because it’s so hard to envisage beyond our known digital point of reference. If you don’t know one reality from the next (to be fair, after the past two years I’m not sure many people do) check out this blog by Pixotope on Mixed Reality, Augmented Reality, Virtual Studios, and Extended Reality.

But in order to unleash creativity in the virtual world, we need to stay more grounded than ever in the ‘real’ world. When we connect with our senses, we give our minds the freedom to play, to explore. After all, it’s why we keep hearing it’s good to allow children to get bored occasionally. It’s also why ‘busy bragging’ is the biggest creativity killer. Not only do people obsessively stack their schedules, those moments we have in between tasks are often spent talking about how busy we are; it’s cognitively overwhelming. 

Creativity is a buzzword often erroneously referred to as a hard skill that can be gained with experience, but creativity is a process – the start of which begins unnoticed, in the pauses between tasks, in those moments we let our minds – dare I say – be idle. Do nothing. Human beings are innately curious, playful; we simply deny this practice to ourselves. Playing is good for business. In Shonda Rhimes’ Ted Talk ‘My Year of Saying Yes’ she describes what happened when she said yes to more play:  “I said yes to less work and more play and somehow I still run my world. My brain is more global, my campfires still burn. The more I play the happier I am and the happier my kids are. The more I play the more I feel like a good mother. The more I play the freer my mind becomes. The more I play the better I work.’

Creativity thrives when we allow the mind to wander, to explore beyond the realms of the day-to-day responsibilities, obligations. In The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, ‘yoga citta vritti nirodha’ is the second sutra. It roughly translates to “yoga stops, or stills, the mind’s fluctuations.” Yoga asanas and breathing exercises prepare the body for meditation, a practice of stillness. What the white western world popularised as ‘mindfulness’, yogis had been practicing for thousands of years. It’s in this practice of letting go of the mind’s fluctuations that we make room for fresh ideas, for realisations. We can’t ‘do’ our way towards thinking.

If we want to find new ideas, we need to make space – not just in our diaries, but in our minds, and our bodies. At Grammatik I combine my second life as a yoga teacher by teaching Vinyasa yoga online to the team to offer a mental and physical pause from hectic agency life.  We make time to make shapes with our bodies to make space for new ideas. And it shows: check out our creative work.