How can creative research enrich design practice?

 How did creative research influence Roger Waters and Gerald Scarfe when creating The Wall? 

Some of the best creative research can be done when researching one's own past experiences and how they can affect us and influence what we create. A fitting example of this is in the creation of Pink Floyd’s album, film and live show The Wall. Band member Roger Waters and cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, worked collaboratively to write the songs and storyline inspired by Roger's life; Gerald’s drawing would inspire Roger’s song writing and Gerald would make his animations based on Roger’s songs. What makes the wall as an album unique is the plot based on Rogers struggles of being an artist and the wall built up between him and his new audience after finding fame, he describes performing as “an alienating experience doing the shows.” During live shows of the album an actual physical wall would slowly get built in front of the band this was to materialize Waters’ feelings of disconnect, the wall was then later used to project Scarfe’s animations onto which fabricated the story and characters further turning the live show from a concert to a theatrical experience. 

The characters in the story are based on the most damaging people in Waters’ life, these characters were created from Waters’ using his hardships and processing them using his artform, song writing, the main ones being a schoolteacher, his mother, and his wife. It encapsulates the struggles of living in post-war Britain and the effects of him losing his father in the war. The loss of his father is the end of his “perfect life” promised by the purpose of the war. This is especially shown in the song Vera where Waters is blaming Vera Lynn for lying even directly quoting her song we’ll meet again in the lyrics “Remember how she said that We would meet again Some sunny day?” He is bringing to life all the lies the country was told during the war to increase nationalism and brainwash the population into fighting a war for the sake of the country which will not give them anything in return. That is another way I interpreted the physical sense of the wall was how all these soldiers were stripped of any individuality and turned into bricks for the government to build a wall of bodies in the trenches. Because of his father's absence his mother subsequently became over-protective, wanting to keep him away from the big world, this, however, was again detrimental to Roger and he expresses this in the song mother when he says “Of course Mama's gonna help build the wall” implying Waters blames his mum for distancing him from the real world and starting to build up the wall in his mind.

 

There is no denying the effects of the war and the socio-economic impacts of it highly influenced both Waters and Scarfe when creating the wall. The album and film highly benefit from the two of them using the creative research of their own past experiences and then bouncing ideas of one another.