Creativity: Innovation & industry Conference

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh look at me, two long blogs in two days! Your should Feel privileged!!!

But this time i have a bit more of a direction i wish to follow. Assessing others ideas and lectures on creativity. I read the vle....I saw the flyer's.....and

In the end, I did send that email and got a free place for the conference(however geeky i felt at the time, it did feel weird for a while, until Kitto arrived it was only girls who represented the second year :O) anyways back onto the subject matter.

As i only had a place for the morning sessions i attended the two lectures. The first one by Margaret A . Boden on Creativity: How does it work?' and the second being by Claudia Eckert on 'Design processes and the rhetoric of creativity' which due to the nature of Margaret's prior lecture, was more about design within the world rather than creativity, but it was still interesting to listen to.

Going back to Margaret A. Boden's lecture, i found this one most interesting and most helpful. She covered aspects i couldn't think of looking for and even if i had, i probably wouldn't have found the information i wanted.

She spoke about how 'Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising and valuable' however she later referred to the words new, surprising and valuable as weasel words.

A Weasel Word as they are referred to are ones which can have a general term as well as a personal one. For instance, an idea which is new to you, may not be new to everybody else, its personally new to you, but not historically new. The same goes for surprising and valuable.

P Creativity, or Personal/Psychological Creativity, according to Margaret is a form of creativity which,when we come up with a 'new' idea it is completely new to us.

H Creativity, or Historical Creativity is defined as being an idea which is new to you, but not historically.

Margaret argues that sometimes one cannot be without the other, But when it comes to P Creativity, we can never fully understand where the idea came from, as even if its new to us as an individual as well, we will never know the mental process in which the other person went through to come to this idea.

Creativity is described in Margaret's paper as not being the only ability we have that depends on non introspectible processes. When we are being creative we don't think about how we are doing it, we just do it. Like breathing, speaking,moving our limbs etc.

Every person has creativity within them, its just dependable on how well we can individually express and unleash the creativeness.

Assessing the points above from the lecture and paper which was given, a lot of those points are extremely valid. We don't think about being creative when we do it. We think about what to do, but not how we got to that stage in the first place.

Take our art projects for instance, those ideas which we come up with are new to us, but are they new historically? How many other people have thought of the same thing prior to us. How many timesdo you wonder where peoples ideascome from? As wierd asthis will sound, i do it all the time. I sometimessit and think:

Who thought a circle thing which would roll, would make transportation easier?
Who called it the Wheel?
Who thought of creating a table?
Who called it a table?
What sparked the idea of using mold as a vaccination?
Who discovered wires? Who made electrical components and made them do what they do?

All of these things you will never know, because we cannot know what went through that persons mind when they were thinking of it.

Margaret A. Broden has also pitched the idea that there are three different forms of creativity:

Combinational
Exploratory
Transformational

Combinational is said to be the generation of unfamiliar and interesting combinations of familiar ideas.

Exploratory is about structured conceptual space. the existing stylistic rules or conventions are used in the process of creating ideas (novel structures). These are those of which there is a possibility that they may or may not have been realised, before the idea was explored.

Transformational is when you change the creative space itself. Like when pointism changed painting.

Different aspects of creativity can usually be deferred back to one of these three forms.

Continued later.....tired ha ha