What is creativity?
“Wow that was a creative solution, you must be a _________”
A) Writer
B) Painter
C) Musician
D) Graphic Designer
When people discuss creativity, they often talk about it as a tradeoff to logical or mathematical ability. It’s become a categorization instead of a skill or ability and, by itself does not mean much. Often, we use other meaningless words to explain creativity; innovative, outside-the-box, imagination. When companies claim to look for creative problem solvers it seems a little redundant; if people solve problems in the best way, does it matter if it is creative?
Creativity almost seems like an ability to be naïve, untethered to reality, but pull everything together before insanity. There are examples of puzzles that adults have difficulties solving as compared to children, often because adults are not creative enough. In this sense, creativity is the ability to ignore heuristics and patterns we’ve developed in our lifetime and approach a problem from an unconventional direction.
The issue is that creativity has become a useless buzzword and is almost a contradiction; most people want creative solutions … but only those that fit in the little box that they present you. Humans are creatures of pattern and comfort, it is difficult for us to leave our habits behind when we’ve found a happy zone. We also love novelty, so as long as you combine “creativity” and the comfort zone, everything will be great. It becomes a little ironic that creativity is now a stereotype, we only classify those who fit into our conception of a creative person. You know, the hipster designer, who has a white board with millions of ideas, sketches and plays the ukulele. If you dared to imagine someone on Wall Street with a suit you will be immediately shamed for … thinking outside the box.
As such, I found this definition of creativity (on google) quite interesting:
Creativity — The use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.
“Especially in the production of artistic work”
Artistic work is what we typically think of when we hear creative; creativity is the word used by parents and teachers when praising children who create something of artistic value. Meanwhile, someone who completes a puzzle or thinks of a new idea in the space of science and mathematics is dubbed clever or smart.
Clever — quick to understand, learn, and devise or apply ideas; intelligent.
“Devise or apply new ideas”. Interesting.
It might seem that I am getting caught up in the semantics of word choice, but it’s important to understand how important word choice is. Words stir up armies, unleash emotions and most importantly get 50 000 re-tweats when assembled in the correct order. Words create social biases, can change the attitude to laws and make up the crux of our communication. So what is in the name we give to those who are creative?
Playing Devils Advocate, Creatively
Now, I would like to start with a blank slate, and open canvas, so to say. Remember the first time you tried playing a musical instrument. For me it was the pots and pans which I hit with a wooden spoon. The second time was my first and last piano lesson.
I could not get my hands to navigate the keyboard, they were uncoordinated and stretching them was unnatural. Learning to play the piano would not be a creative task, but rather a mechanical learning of coordination.
Remember the first time you drew a picture. It was probably some squiggles or splotches that meant something to you and is still hanging on your parents wall. By the time I had goals of drawing something and self awareness, the process became much more difficult. Faces looked like beans, trees like sticks attached to clouds. I took some art lessons, but my hands could only draw, sculpt or paint to a certain precision, things turned out ok but after hours of meticulous work.
Now think of your favorite artist, musician, writer. What have they done for thousands of hours? Practiced. Refined their stroke, sang that note and studied others’ work. Tireless work of technique practice that only bares the fruits after thousands of sunk hours, and sometimes never.
Was all that practice creative? Practicing replicating faces, learning the musical theory and rhyming schemes. Seems a little mundane and robotic doesn’t it? So where does the idea of the creative artist come from?
Art is often seen as a representation of life seen through an artistic lens depicting a commentary, an emotion or an aesthetic. What gives people the ability to be “creative” is the opportunity to play with a familiar form that we all know: audible sounds, the visual world and written communication. A mirror image of the world is familiar yet different enough to be novel. A cookie cutter pop song talks about a love story that connects vaguely to our hopes and memories. It is the familiarity, yet novelty that inspires us.
But what does this mean? My goal is not to redefine art or even define it for that matter. My goal is to explain why creativity and art need to decoupled.
A Personal Touch
Remember a time when you spent countless hours working on something, but you were unable to become proficient. The pieces did not align and you felt like you were treading water in the dark. Extending a guess, I believe you were probably thinking of either a math, foreign language or athletics moment.
What led to this guess? The same key two ideas, familiarity and novelty. As we begin to learn a new language, study math or engage in a sport we see some familiarity with our lives: similar communication structures, an ability to visualize addition and movements representing running crawling or jumping of some sort. Frustration arises when we are unable to separate our world of existence with the world that’s required to make the activity happen. How do you pronounce a letter when it doesn’t appear in your native language? How do divide a negative? How do you contort your body and do a flip?
The answer is simple, change your frame of reference. Many activities require you to accept axioms and basic movements that are not familiar, but once we do, they become second nature. We accept that the everyday world cannot represent mathematics always and we limit our tunnel vision of analogy. We accept that our pronunciation is not correct and focus on the syllables of the new sound. We accept that walking on our hands is not natural but aim to build up that skill.
While the answer is simple, the practice is hard; it takes hours of meticulous practice to embed these new ideas into our lives.
Now we return to the subjects we consider creative. If we look at the first part of our dictionary definition — The use of the imagination or original ideas — , we are only limited now to the medium we choose to work with.
Two common areas that are commonly not seen as creative are mathematics and coding; the claim is that they are repetitive, logical tasks. They are, or rather can be, but so can the arts. It is logical to draw a maple tree when depicting nature in Canada. It becomes repetitive trying to play the high D on a trombone hoping you don’t sound like a dying duck. The difference is that many people don’t get past the point of entering the world of math, science, coding. These activities have different systems that you have to accept and accepting those systems is often a repetitive task.
Another point often mentioned, is that mathematics and coding/tech are not creative because solutions to problems already exist in the forms of algorithms and best practices. This is true for coding and math, but also everything else. You wouldn’t try to paint with a pencil. That doesn’t make sense, someone has already develop a competent paintbrush. IDEO, one of the top design firms in the world has a methodology (algorithm) for driving it’s creative process. We are creatures of pattern regardless of the field.
So as we reexamine what it means to be creative, I would have two key takeaways.
The first is to consider creativity as a measure of the ability to problem solve. If you solve a problem in the best way, you were creative in solving that problem. The questions is whether you really solved the problem in the best way or merely solved it in the best way you knew or could think of.
The second is how we communicate the meaning of creativity. Telling people what creativity means, and as a result perpetuating stereotypes, limits individuals ability to be creative, express themselves and achieve their goals.
Some of the most creative people will work on the most abstract math problems in existence, and if society instead steers them to the arts where they aren’t as happy or proficient, what was the point? Similarly, if you steer those interested in patterns strictly into the sciences, who benefits if they aren’t happy or productive? Music might have ended up being their passion and practice.
It might be worthwhile to consider the stereotypes that exist today, even if they aren’t the ones talked about.
If you enjoyed the piece, let me know with some👏!
