What is creativity?
I did my second Rooster Talk about the importance of curiosity to fuel your creativity at the Glove Factory on Friday 3rd December 2021.
It was almost two years after I did my first on Dieter Ram’s Ten Principles for Good Design which I subsequently split into ten blog posts. These have been enduringly popular so I thought I'd do something similar for this talk.
Prologue
I set up Brighter Side fifteen years ago in 2006. Without being creative, keeping my mind open to new ideas and continually learning I doubt I would still be running my own business.
Every business has to evolve
In 2006 Facebook was confined to a few Ivy League universities, Twitter was a niche interest and Instagram didn’t exist. The first iPhone was still one year away from being launched.
Social media, mobile friendly websites and the ubiquity of responsive websites have all made me rethink my approach. Without embracing these changes and enthusiastically learning new skills I would have stagnated.
If you want to continue offering the best service to your customers and go beyond the brief then you need to be curious.
This is why curiosity and creativity are so important.
Hiding your sources
Einstein said creativity was “knowing how to hide your sources.”
I’m going to disobey the genius and openly share them. Because that’s an important part of creativity. Copying ideas, mixing them up and making them into something new.
My first acknowledgement goes to Maria Popova and her website of ‘interestingness’ The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings).
Her article on James Webb Young’s book, ‘A Technique for Producing Ideas’ gave me the idea to split creativity into five stages.
I’ve mixed the ideas up to more closely align with my experiences, but the basics were from this article. It repeated things I’ve read before, but said them in a different way. That’s being creative.
Imagination - an unfair advantage
Mad Men era advertising wizard, Ed McCabe, said
“Imagination is one of the last remaining legal means you have to gain an unfair advantage over your competition.”
In an era of machine learning, clerical and professional roles will change beyond recognition or may no longer exist. Your role may be under threat. Mine might.
But one thing machine learning will never be able to do is imagine. To think creatively like a human can. While we have our imagination we have a unique approach to the world. If we use it well, we can stay ahead of the competition.
An alternative view of creativity comes from John Cleese. He wrote ‘A Short and Cheerful Guide to Creativity’ which has provided a rich source of material for me.
“Wherever you can find a way of doing things that is better than what has been done before, you are being creative.”
Why does it have to be this way?
Edward de Bono, proponent of lateral thinking, said that creative types are always asking “why does it have to be this way?”
The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David
It’s a spin on the Socratic method. Socrates urged us to question everything. Celebrate your ignorance and challenge every presumption. Ask 'why?' until you understand it.
Or as Dave Trott says, “… state a position, question the position by stating an exception, arrive at a new position, then repeat, until eventually we reach a point which Socrates calls ‘aporia’, or opening our mind to new possibilities.”
The Ancient Greek authorities didn’t like him encouraging people to question everything. They instructed him to drink a cup of hemlock.
The summary I like most is by Will Gompertz (ex BBC Arts Correspondent and now Director of Arts at one of my favourite buildings, The Barbican). He wrote in his much thumbed book ‘Think Like an Artist’:
“Questions in need of a solution are at the heart of creativity because they force us to think. And it is when we think that we start to question, and to question is to imagine. And to imagine is to conceive ideas, and conceiving ideas the basis for creativity.”
It’s hard to define creativity, but these quotes will hopefully set us on our way.
