Colleagues
With the increasing commoditization of design research and practice I
have grown concerned about how we are educating for creativity and
fostering creative personality characteristics in our students.
Many on the list may not know about the seminal research by Donald W.
Mackinnon "The Personality Correlates of Creativity: A Study of
American Architects" undertaken at the Institute of Personality
Assessment and Research, University of California Berkeley as part of
a larger investigation of creativity in the arts, sciences and
professions.
40 creative architects among 124 identified and ranked in three
levels of creativity by professors, editors and peers, were invited to
Berkeley for a week of testing. Mackinnon's summary after this
exhaustive testing stated goals that, in my opinion, we should seek in
ourselves as well as the students we educate. He wrote:
"If I were to summarize what is most generally characteristic of the
creative architect as we have seen him (sic), it is his high level of
effective intelligence, his openness to experience, his freedom from
petty constraints, and impoverishing inhibitions, his aesthetic
sensitivity, his cognitive flexibility, his independence of thought
and action, his high level of energy, his unquestioning commitment to
creative endeavor, and his unceasing striving for creative solutions
to the ever more difficult architectural problems he constantly sets
for himself". end quote
Are we consciously addressing these correlates of creativity?
Shouldn't we be?
Charles Burnette
[log in to unmask]
MacKinnon D W. The nature and nurture of creative talent.
Amer. Psychol. 17:484-95, 1962. [University of California, Berkeley,
CA] Cited over 195 times between 1962 and December 28 1981
In Search of Human Effectiveness: Identifying and Developing
Creativity (Paperback)
by Donald W. MacKinnon, Creative Education Foundation, 1978
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