what is creativity?

Creativity. You hear the word a lot. "the creative community". "creatives". The use of the word creatives has grown massively in the last 40 years.

But what is creativity? 

And what isn't creativity?
Can creativity be learned?
How are some people creative?
How can I be more creative?

I read "Creativity" from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to help me answer these questions and thoroughly enjoyed it. These are my notes summarizing the document.

What is and is not creativity

The term "creative" can be applied to 3 kinds of things:

• person
• process or 
• product

(where product can be an artifact, performance or idea (a tangible outcome))

One common definition of a creative product is if it's "new and valuable". Just being new is insufficient.
The philosopher Kant defined as "original" and "exemplary". Which has become somewhat of a standard definition in psychology.
"value" is debateable because for example a novel way of polluting can be new, but not valuable. It has value if it's useful, worthwhile, fit for purpose, effective.

People and process are creative if they produce creative products.

Some theorists propose that a creative product must satisfy additional conditions, a creative product must be brought about in the right way (process), including these conditions:

• surprising 
• for an idea to be creative you cannot have fully seen it coming (hence the surprise element)
• how does a creator makes something surprising? Boden proposed "three types of creativity":  combinatorial, exploratory and transformative
• combinatorial: old ideas combined in new ways
• exploratory: creative exploration within a "conceptual space"; where a conceptual space is a system of rules/constraints to facilitate a style of thinking
• transformational: the creator transforms the conceptual space itself
• original
• has to do with a kind of casual process the creator must employ
• spontaneous
• you cannot follow an "exact plan" to be creative
• you have to be to some extent ignorant of the end, or the means, or both. And this ignorance opens up room for spontaneity and creativity
• Brian Gilmour of Pink Floyd talked about creating "Shine on ..", "I was in a rehearsal room doing all sort of little things and that one comes out"
• and/or agential
• has to be created by an agent and must be intentional to be creative e.g. accidentally making a creative outcome does not make you creative

Creative people produce creative outcomes. It's not enough to have creative ability. You must exercise it.

Can creativity be learned?

Traditional thinkers such as Kant said no. Modern thinkers say yes.

There are distinct lines of argument: learning is imitation, imitation is incompatible with creativity so one cannot learn to be creative (likewise following rules).

Kant said: "a genius does not follow rules, a genius invents the rules, indirectly, by creating exemplary works which others extract rules from".

However there is disagreement. Not all learning is imitation, many things are learned through trial and error as well as direct experience. 
Imitating others can be a way to learn which can then be a basis for and followed by creativity.

People can learn to enhance their creative abilities and motivations and thus learn to become more creative. You can strengthen your intrinsic motivation to be creative (take pleasure in creative activities) as well as extrinsic motivations (rewarded with praise, grades, compensation etc.)

The creative process

Modern philosophers propose there is a creative process which includes commonly accepted phases as follows:
1. Preparation; invest in learning and practicing to acquire knowledge and skills

• noting the famous 10 year rule where it can take 10 years to become an expert and become creative
• in skiing top skiers "play with the mountain" because they have first attained expert skills

2. Generation; production of creative ideas with conscious/unconscious incubation; 4 suggested means:

• blind generation: ideas generated but not guided by prior knowledge or how valuable they'd be
• default-mode network: active when the brain is at rest or engaged in self referential thought
• use of imagination: freedom and playfulness of imagination, safely try out and explore hypotheses
• incubation: ideas come when focussed on something else (unconscious incubation); unconsciously our brain is active trying combinations of ideas, generating random conceptual associations

"if you want to have good ideas you have to have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away" - Linus Pauling, Nobel prize winner

Researchers have found that forgetting about a problem works well to overcome fixation on ineffective ideas and instead allow the actual solution to pop up.

The musician Brian Eno had a system for spurring creativity he called Oblique Strategies. It was a set of over 100 cards each of which is a suggestion of a course of action or thinking to assist creativity. For example "try faking it!", "what would your closest friend do?" "honor thy error as hidden intention". There's a great story told by David Bowie of when he collaborated with Brian Eno. One day they both took a card from the strategies and did not tell each other their cards. Then collaborated. But struggled. Turns out their cards were opposites!

3. Insight; experience the emergence of new idea

• typically requires something new on the part of the individual, and one must often change views of the structure of the very problem
• break free of assumptions, form new connections
• The Beatles were amazing creative musicians. They did not follow rules of music and songwriting. Paul McCartney did not know how to write or read music, but he said that allowed him a lot of freedom to create what sounded good. 

4. Evaluation; assess the idea to determine if should be discarded or used and improved

• a crucial part of creative work consists of evaluating ideas, keeping those which are useful, discarding others
• to do this one has to have knowledge of a range of factors to evaluate ideas e.g. in code this could be is the code elegant, not unnecessarily complex, understandable, scaleable, etc.

5. Externalization; expose the idea in a concrete form

• creators manipulate and build upon their impressions..using sketches, outlines and other representations
• some studies report people discovered and solved more problems when they used sketches during a task; visual diagrams also improve outcomes
• visualization helps to offload information from the brain so it frees up space in the mind to step back and examine from afar and also start on new ideas
• successful creators are skilled at executing their ideas; identifying resources to make successful, improvising and adjusting plans as new information emerges
• "Real Artists Ship" - Steve jobs. A rallying cry that emphasizes that ideas alone are not enough, you have to execute on the ideas.

The process stages are not discrete one after another but instead are more messy, involve trial and error, are iterative, can include ideas in different stages.

Here's a fun one for Beatles fans. Paul mcartney creating "Get Back" Riffing, no words, just the tune. George yawing as Paul creates a classic. Wow.


references
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/creativity/#CognScieCrea
Insight: https://faculty.washington.edu/mbassok/psych469_readings/bowden-insight.pdf

https://www.creativethinkinghub.com/steve-jobs-was-right-real-artists-ship