Rosan's post regarding creativity is interesting from a number of angles...and raises some fascinating questions as the discussion on creativity unfolds...

Can creativity be isolated and examined apart from other aspects of the person?

Is it possible to work as a designer and not be creative?

Is 'creative design' the exclusive domain of designers? 

Is everyone creative? Is everyone equally creative?

Do we want our designers to be creative?

Rosan also seems to be opening-up the question of the place of the 'creative' designer in participative design.

Why is a creative designer incompatible with participative design? Perhaps it has something to do with the way creativity is manifested in such a process...

Rosan's prototypical creative type is 'idiosyncratic, lone, difficult and anti-social' - this seems very narrow.

Whilst no-one should claim to be an expert on creativity - research into creativity is interesting and illuminating but may not always be found in the domain of 'research into creativity'. This means widening rather than narrowing the field of study - perhaps research into creativity, especially as it relates to design, may mean leaving the domain of design...

Whilst it might be true to say that each of us is creative, perhaps many of us have lost our confidence, we have become creatively incapacitated. 

The twin conditions of modernity seem to be dulled awareness and distracted attention - these conditions have robbed us of a crucial something necessary for creativity - if it must have a name lets call it curiosity and wonder.

I see these twin conditions as underlying the most significant problems we face today.

Young children, particularly pre-school children - before the socialising juggernaut of the school has begun to flatten and stamp them out - seems to be an appropriate archetype for curiosity and wonder. Children explore the world with all their senses, they are inquisitive, they wear out questions, they poke about and explore. 

Over the past twenty years I have parented five children. The wonder and curiosity that each of them displayed in the pre-school period was markedly less mediated by what others around them thought, they were less self conscious, they explored, they inquired, they opened stuff up and they inspired. 

I listened to my two youngest children improvising games and stories. Sometimes the games follow a pattern with predetermined roles, at other times the games emerge in the moment. The children adapt themselves, their voices and their bodies, to take on certain characteristics consistent with the role of the entity they are playing. Sometimes they adapt everyday objects and artifacts, pots and pans, a cardboard box, as props for their games. At other times these same everyday objects are stimuli for their games.

For my two boys a large cardboard box can be a car, a boat, a house or a spaceship, morphing seamlessly between conceptions in a blink. A hole might be cut in the cardboard box to represent a window or a door, cushions are added to the interior as seats, they drape a sheet across the opening to enclose themselves inside. The boys adapt the box in order that they may make more of it in their minds eye and in their play.

An adult sees a cardboard box and names it dead - cardboard box. 

A cardboard box is something to be recycled or disposed of, or perhaps something to be kept for storing or moving something else that is worth keeping. 

For an adult the cardboard box is a utilitarian container. Can I use this box?

The quick mind of the child is unfettered by notions of what one is meant to make of a cardboard box. A cardboard box is whatever the child can make of it in their thoughts and in their play. As adults we appreciate such thinking and behaviour in children and recognize the role such play has in a child's learning and development. 

The world of a child is fundamentally a creative milieu - curiosity and inquiry operate in tandem for the child to make meaning and sense of their world.

The creative world of the child is equally well suited to isolated play as it is to collaborative and participative play.

If we want to learn how to be creative perhaps we should let children show us in their play. 

The model of creativity I am drawn to cannot be prescribed - we cannot say to someone 'be more creative'.

Perhaps as adults we need to play more, perhaps in play we will reawaken the curiosity and wonder that sleeps there...

Peter

ps - a nice place to begin the move 'outside' design may be found in a little book called 'Everything has a shadow except ants" (Reggio Children, Reggio Emilia, 1990) - in this book the reader will find children playing, investigating meaning, exploring, creating, collaborating, participating, designing... (thanks Daria : )




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"So much worse for the wood if it wakes up as a violin" Rimbaud 


Peter Burrows
project-mu 
Interactive Information Institute
RMIT University
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