Hi David,
Good points.
There is a third position.
That 'creativity is an incidental non-existent artifact of the way we use
language. I.e. a product of our emotionally driven biases of the way we use
a language toolkit based on nouns and verbs.
Through a combination of conceptual laziness and desire for over
simplification we nominalise part of an activity, i.e. we make up a noun
for it rather than using the verb form.
As always, nominalization reduces information and sensitivity of any
representation and increases the opportunity for us to wrangle the meaning
to whatever we want it to mean (that's why nominalization is such a powerful
tool in politicians', advertisers' and other rhetoricists' manipulative
language toolbox).
If you start from this position that creativity is a problematic accidental
concept borne of lazy thinking and personal greed and that we would be
better using the verb form, then it shifts the focus onto activities that
include all and every process around creating something new (idea or thing).
The problem is we have such an emotional self interest in using a tool that
gives us such manipulative power and the self pretence that we understand
something because we can name it (it's a bit like thinking one is rich
because one knows the term 'gold').
In support of the above, its interesting to see what happens of you ask
someone theorising about 'creativity' to simply change their theory to verb
form (e.g. using the various tenses of 'to create'). Often they get
emotionally upset or angry, and reach the point of saying 'Creativity is
nothing to do with creating ....'
As usual, sloppy epistemological foundations of an idea leads to an
apparently new 'field' that uses up lots of human energy unnecessarily.
Best wishes,
Terry
____________________
Dr. Terence Love, FRDS, AMIMechE, PMACM
Director Design-focused Research Group, Design Out Crime Research Group
Researcher, Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute
Associate, Planning and Transport Research Centre
Curtin University, PO Box U1987, Perth, Western Australia 6845
Mob: 0434 975 848, Fax +61(0)8 9305 7629, [log in to unmask]
Visiting Professor, Member of Scientific Council
UNIDCOM/ IADE, Lisbon, Portugal
Honorary Fellow, Institute of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development
Management School, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
____________________
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David
Sless
Sent: Thursday, 23 July 2009 12:50 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Educating for Creativity
There are at least two starting points for research on creativity (probably
many more, but two will do for the moment.)
In the first, researchers start from the proposition that creativity is
something that exists. The job of research then is to establish exactly what
it is, what gives rise to it, what nurtures it, what destroys it, and so on.
I take Charles Burnette to be starting from that position.
The second starting position is to suggest that 'creativity' is a social
construct, something we can talk about, with a history of conversations
traceable through the many texts on the subject. The task of research then
is to investigate the history of the idea: the many ways, over time, that we
have articulated ideas about creativity, and the social contexts in which we
have done so. I take Amanda Bill as starting from that position. These two
positions are not mutually exclusive but they do lead in different
directions and give priority to different questions. At certain points these
differing starting positions have nothing to say to each other.
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