David Sless said:
>If you have a theory, in the scientific
>sense, it leads to predictions. Ultimately, it would enable you to specify
>the conditions for 'creativity' to arise. In principle, you should therefore
>be able to build a 'creative' machine. This would, of course, obviate the
>necessity of having designers
.....
I won't go as far as Ken in my reading of David's post (apart from anything
else I owe David money so I need to tread carefully)
However I think David is wrong in his conclusion above. If you adhere to a
Newtonian view then, yes, scientific ventures seem to be heading towards an
understanding of the world as a machine. However, and luckily, Newton's
adventure ran out of steam around 100 years ago when it started to become clear
that there were things that we could usefully describe, theorise (in several
interesting and contradictory ways) and work with but never completely predict.*
So our diverse attempts to describe and reflect on creativity (for want of a
better word) are perfectly reasonable in the context of learning and practicing
design. The fact that they are unlikely to lead to some future creative genome
project where the ground rules for innovation are uncovered and hard-wired into
our industrial systems is no problem.
Incidentally there are formal proposals for creativity machines. Nonaka and
Takeuchi (1995) have
proposed organisational structures which support creative knowledge development
and I get the impression that there is a sizeable "management of creativity"
movement in business which hopes to tackle the creativity gap with the same
kind of bullet points and flowcharts that you use to map out a marketing
strategy. They aren't too interested in the creative traditions of artists and
designers as it would be a bit difficult to send the entire accounts department
off on a life drawing class. Jolly good luck to them I say.
best wishes from Sheffield, home of Dr Milton Wainwright who has recently
isolated a bacterium that may cause cancers in those with a genetic
pre-disposition to the disease.
Chris Rust
*In fact I feel that the current state of hubris in the biosciences is due
entirely to the fact that they are in their infancy and have yet to run into
the sort of conundrums that had a salutary and humanising effect on physicists
in the last century. We are already seeing the signs - now that the great
effort of sequencing has been made, geneticists are having to think what to do
next. This happened to 19th Century physics where some people began to feel
(quite reasonably on the evidence available to them) that there was hardly
anything left to discover. In the event there was a whole new world of
mysteries waiting exploration and a completely new way of thinking to be
developed.
Nonaka, I and Takeuchi, H. (1995) The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese
Companies Create the Dynamic of Innovation, Oxford University Press, New York
*******************************************
Professor Chris Rust
Art and Design Research Centre
Sheffield Hallam University UK
www.shu.ac.uk/design
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tel +44 114 225 2706
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