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Creativity is a human mental phenomenon based around the deployment of mental skills and/or conceptual tools, which, in turn, originate and develop innovation, inspiration, or insight.
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The scope of creativity
For some people, the word creativity conjures up associations strictly with artistic endeavours and with the writing of literature. Some other have also linked creativity with moments of sudden scientific or engineering insight since at least the time of Archimedes in Ancient Greece.
Pop psychology sometimes associates it with right or forehead brain activity or even specifically with lateral thinking.
Within the different modes of artistic expression, one can postulate a continuum extending from "interpretation" to "innovation". Established artistic movements and genres pull practitioners to the "interpretation" end of the scale, whereas original thinkers strive towards the "innovation" pole. Note that we conventionally expect some "creative" people (dancers, actors, orchestra-players w/.) to perform (interpret) while allowing others (writers, painters, composers w/.) more freedom to express the new and the different.
Since the time of Graham Wallas and his work Art of Thought, published in 1926, some have considered creativity a legacy of the evolutionary process, which allowed humans to quickly adapt to rapidly changing environments.
Today, creativity forms in some eyes the core activity of a growing section of the global economy — the so-called "creative industries" — capitalistically generating (generally non-tangible) wealth through the creation and exploitation of intellectual property or through the provision of creative services.
The word "creativity" can convey an implication of constructing novelty without relying on any existing constituent components (ex nihilo - compare creationism). Contrast alternative theories, for example:
- artistic inspiration, which posits the transmission of visions from divine sources such as the Muses. Compare with invention.
- artistic evolution, which stresses obeying established ("classical") rules and imitating or appropriating to produce subtly different but unshockingly understandable work. Compare with crafts.
Dimensions of creativity
Creativity can be assessed on several dimensions:
- Intellectual leadership. Creative thinkers are able to create new and promising theories or exciting trends which inspire others to follow up; in essence starting a movement, school of thought or trend.
- Sensitivity to problems. Being able to identify problems that challenge others and open up a new field of thought is a mark of creative thinking.
- Originality. Creative thinkers are able to find ideas or solutions that no one else has been able to come up with. Patents are given out only to original ideas.
- Ingenuity. Ingenious solutions are able to solve problems in a neat and surprising way or which also reflect a new perspective at looking at the problem.
- Unusualness. Creative thinkers are able to see the remote associations between ideas. When word association tests are given, people in highly creative literary fields like poets give a higher proportion of unique responses.
- Usefulness. Solutions or ideas that are also practical are also considered more creative as the creator is able to meet the constraints of the problem while at the same time producing unusual and original solutions.
- Appropriateness. Non sequitur ideas can be highly original and unusual, but are not as creative as ideas which are also appropriate to the situation. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Trilogy is within the genre of fantasy writing, but has also shown itself to be both convincing and imaginative.
Types of creativity and creatives
In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler (1964 and various imprints) lists three types of creative individual, the Artist, the Sage and the Jester. Paul Birch and Brian Clegg (Crash Course in Creativity, 2002) have called the three types of creativity that result "aaahhh", "ah ha", and "ha ha". The Artist creates beauty or challenge (aaahhh). The Sage creates ideas or solutions (ah ha) and the Jester creates humour (ha ha). Believers in this trinity hold all three elements necessary in business and can identify them in all in "truly creative" companies as well.
One can also categorise creativity by where and how it arises.
Measuring creativity
The ultimate test of a creativity is history. Highly creative works will survive the passage of time to remain in our memories: Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion, Shakespeare's plays. Genrich Altshuller introduced approaching creativity as an exact science with TRIZ in the 1950s. The psychologist Robert Sternberg has proposed to apply the name creatology to scientific studies of creativity.
Creativity can be measured based on a response to a variety of test scenarios:
- Expressing ideas: the ability to easily develop and juggle an abundance of associations and phrases when presented with a single word or image.
- Combining ideas in a new way: developing a wide range of innovative solutions when asked to explore new possibilities for an everyday item (such as a brick).
- Finding new uses for existing ideas: generating an original idea or solution based on a suggested existing idea
- Expansion: the ability to work up a tentative idea into a practical solution.
- Focus and discrimination: recognizing the central challenge within an approach to a solution, while discounting any distracting minor elements, and then evaluating the difficulties.
- Perspective swapping: the ability to suggest ways of viewing a known problem from a completely different perspective.
J. P. Guilford's group constructed several tests to measure creativity:
- Plot Titles where participants are given the plot of a story and asked to write original titles.
- Quick Responses is a word association test scored for uncommonness.
- Figure Concepts where participants were given simple drawings of objects and individuals and asked to find qualities or features that are common by two or more drawings; these were scored for uncommonness.
- Unusual Uses is finding unusual uses for common everyday objects such as bricks.
- Remote Associations where participants are asked to find a word between two given words (e.g. Hand _____ Call)
- Remote Consequences where participants are asked to generate a list of consequences of unexpected events (e.g. loss of gravity)
Social attitudes to creativity
'Creatitivity' is much praised in principle, but much derided in practice. Those in logical and ordered organisations may praise it but be reluctant to set a creative individual 'loose' in their ordered system. Business is increasingly claiming that professional "creatives" do not have a monopoly on the concept of creativity, and that Problem solving in general may require a flexible mind. Employers may value lawyers, accountants, people in sales, and others more highly if such people can use a "creative" approach to their work, albeit within the confines of a logical and constraining system. The phrases "thinking outside the box" and "thinking outside the square" express this idea.
Ambivalence to creativity in the West may perhaps be due to the culture's image of creativity; the ingesting of drugs to generate visions; the celebration of eccentric behaviour; the possible cross-over between creativity and mental illness; the often bohemian sexual tastes of artists; the cultural association of artists with a life of poverty and misery.
Fostering creativity
Some see the conventional system of schooling as "stifling" of creativity and attempt (particularly in the pre-school/kindergarten and early school years) to provide a creativity-friendly, rich, imagination-fostering environment for young children. Compare Waldorf School.
A growing number of pop psychologists are making money off the idea that one can learn to become more "creative". Several different researchers have proposed several different approaches to prop up this idea, ranging from psychologicalognitive, such as:
- Synectics
- Purdue Creative Thinking Program
- lateral thinking (courtesy of Edward de Bono)
to the highly structured such as:
- TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving
- ARIZ, the Algorithm of Inventive Problem-Solving both developed by the Russian scientist Genrich Altshuller.
See also: creativity techniques.
A study by the psychologist J. Philippe Rushton found that creativity correlated with intelligence and psychoticism (Rushton, 1990).
Periods and Personalities
- 4th century of the Christian Era
- Pappus of Alexandria introduced the term "heuristics"
- Early 20th century
- Fritz Zwicky - Morphological Analysis
- Pablo Picasso painter
- Marcel Duchamp artist
- Carl Jung classified creativity as one of the five main instinctive forces in humans (Jung 1964)
- Edward Matchett - Fundamental design method (1968)
- Carl Rogers's essay "Towards a Theory of Creativity" (1961):
- Wiliam Gordon - Synectics
- Edward de Bono - Lateral thinking
- Albert Rothenberg coined the term 'Janusian thinking'
- Yoji Akao - Quality function deployment
- Total creativity - the ultimate goal in the philosophy of John David Garcia
- Paul PalnikCreative Consciousness The healthiest state of mind. 1981
- Robert Sternberg proposed the name "creatology"
See also:
- Art
- Creative accounting
- Creative thinking
- Creative writing
- Creativity techniques
- Design
- Flow
- Intelligence (trait)
- Innovation
References
- Rushton, J.P. (1990). Creativity, intelligence, and psychoticism. Personality and Individual Differences 11: 1291–1298.
External links
- Explore, Express and Discuss "Inherent Creative Ability"
- Aha! Puzzles - Original creative puzzles by Lloyd King
- Creativity Techniques
- A wiki for Creativity Techniques
- CREAX - a collection of creativity-oriented links
- Creativity in the Bible
- Creativity - Lecture notes from a university course
- The Creative Education Foundation, which characterises itself as a non-profit organization of leaders in the field of creativity theory and practice.
- Playing Together for Fun: Creative Play and Lifelong Games
- Mental Athletics Programme - An interactive, practical and fun way to explore business creativity
- Creativity & Innovation Tube line - a novel visual representation of the creativity & innovation process
Creativity Books
Essays:
- The Creative Act by Marcel Duchamp. (1957)
