As a PhD student interested in the topic of creativity, I would like to
contribute to this discussion. I know some will have problems with the
following generalisation, but after extensive literature review I tend to
agree with those who put it simply in the following terms:
"Readers of the Handbook are sometimes confronted by speculation that is
only loosely related to empirical data, by sweeping generalizations that
are not tightly supported by research evidence, and by a level of
theorizing that is too vague (...) An important challenge for the next 50
years of creativity research is to develop a clearer definition of
creativity and to use a combination of research methodologies that will
move the field from speculation to specification." Mayer, Fifty Years of
Creativity Research, a conclusion, in Sternberg, R. (ed), Handbook of
Creativity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 449 460.
Speculation has been indeed a major obstacle to understand creativity, from
anecdotal accounts to self-help manuals. But in academic fields the state
is not a lot clearer. Take for instance the majority of research programs
that start by separating control groups of 'creative individuals'; whatever
the criteria it seems odd to define a priori creative subjects with the
intention to then inspect their characteristics and extract those elements
that are then taught to 'normal' people in order to be creative. These
criteria often include questionnaires or tests to assess thinking styles or
personality profiles, or are based on peer-judgements, or popularity of a
solution, which could be significant if they did not all measure different
things:
"High scores on a creativity test do not signal that one is necessarily
creative in one's actual vocation or avocation, nor is there convincing
evidence that individuals deemed creative by their discipline or culture
necessarily exhibit the kinds of divergent-thinking skills that are the
hallmark of creativity tests. (...) Knowledge that one will be judged on
some criterion of 'creativeness' or 'originality' tends to narrow the scope
of what one can produce; in contrast, the absence of an evaluation seems to
liberate creativity." Gardner, H.: 1993, Creating Minds, an Anatomy of
Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky,
Eliot, Graham and Gandhi, Basic Books, New York
No doubt a considerable body of knowledge has been built in the last
decades on issues around what designers may be interested to call
'creativity' and there is much to learn from these apparently disconnected
research programs. Perhaps one way in which designers and design
researchers may address this difficult question is in relation to their
disciplines. For instance, what is the role of
'what-each-one-of-us-may-call-creativity' in design? Most designers that I
know would seem obvious (arrogantly obvious at times, naively obvious at
others) that design and creativity go hand by hand (is good design
necessarily creative? Christiaans (1992) suggests that the answer is "no"),
and is commonly taken for granted that in design one is constantly seeking
to be creative, so it would seem that there is at least an implicit
knowledge of what is what designers do when they say they are being -or
seeking to be- creative. This stands as a perfectly valid research topic
and one in which significant progress will be made in the next ten years.
That is, once a strong field emerges from the connection of various
existing branches of knowledge and a more suitable combination of research
methodologies are found.
From my point of view, studies of creativity that focus on internal
characteristics of individuals are very limited as change processes at the
individual level are fundamentally rooted in change processes at the
collective (social / environmental) level, and as some designers show, vice
versa. Treating these in isolation often implies either a mysterious source
that many are still prone to label 'illumination' or 'divine inspiration',
or to simply neglect the generation of new ideas -as in diffusion studies.
I am sure that there are as many views on creativity as members of this
list exist, but it is always interesting to see one of the last remnants of
the Middle Ages in people that still advocate that creativity sits outside
formal human inquiry.
--Ricardo Sosa
References
Christiaans, H.: 1992, Creativity in Design, the Role of Domain Knowledge
in Designing, Lemma BV, Utrecht.
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