Creativity

What is the nature of creativity?

Post 1

Sunday, July 25, 2010 - 1:25pm

I don't think your question is phrased properly. According to Wikipedia, creativity is the ability to generate innovative ideas and manifest them from thought into reality. I think you should be asking, "What is the nature of the process of creating?"

You wouldn't ask, "What is the nature of activity?" You would ask, "What is the nature of the process of acting?"

Sam

WIJG?

Post 2

Monday, July 26, 2010 - 5:55am

Oh, thanks.

Alright, let's try this again: What is the nature of the process of creating?

Post 3

Monday, July 26, 2010 - 6:18am

There are an infinite number of unique streams of 0's and 1's. One form of creativity is when one modifies or combines known streams of 0's and 1's into a new stream of 0's and 1's. The usefulness of this form of creativity is dependent on what the new stream of 0's and 1's do.

All work stored on a computer is stored as 0's and 1's. Lots of people in the world today spend most of their working hours creating streams of 0's and 1's. : )

Maybe you could give an example that kind of helps explain what you are trying to figure out?

Post 4

Monday, July 26, 2010 - 7:11am

Brandon, you may find this helpful.

Post 5

Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - 4:18am

Brandon,

In Objectivity Merlin�s essay �Imagination and Cognition� linked in Post 4 is a good place to start.

You might like to read also Kathleen Touchstone�s essay Intuition, the Subconscious, and the Acquisition of Knowledge.

Abstract

intuition

The Act of Creation

reason

Roger Bissell wrote about fundamental nature of artistic creation in the section �Art, Nature, and Reality� (pp. 46�54) in his essay The Essence of Art.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PS - A couple of books worth checking out:

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
Mihaly Csikszentmihaly

Creativity
John Brockman, editor

Included in this collection of 10 essays are these:

�Seven Creators of the Modern Era�
Howard Gardner

�Aspects of Scientific Discovery: Aesthetics and Cognition�
Howard E. Gruber

�The Creative Brain�
Richard Restak

�Genius and Chance: A Darwinian Perspective�
Dean Keith Simonton

(Edited by Stephen Boydstun on 7/27, 5:02am)

Post 6

Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - 5:15am

Stephen, as an architect, you are positiioned to give more than citations. What, in particular, about these works is especially cogent?

I confess to not being able to hack through Merlin's piece in Objectivity. I have a few things to do over the next few days before I can get back to recreational reading, but I needed to get to the point, rather than traipse through history with Immanuel Kant.

It is one thing to analyze the creative process after the fact, it is another to show how it can be done. Edward de Bono claimed to have a repeatable technique for teaching creativity.

Over the years, I found that people who seek it, find it, by whatever means, and usually several. I also observed that people whom I consider truly creative do not give it much thought. In other words, they are creative, rather than studying (other people's) creativity.

One of the reasons that I learned to fly was to understand the processes of teaching and learning. Flying requires both several sets of technical knowledge as well as physical ability and coordination. You have to know physics, mathematics, meteorology and law -- all of which can be done in a classroom -- but the application comes from manoevering a craft in four dimensions at 60 to 600 mph, depending on your rating.

So, too, with architecture. Yesterday, walking the street above a riverfront park, I admired a single span footbridge, maybe 30 feet. Cute... but then there is Falling Water, which has its own problems. Artists like Magritte or Dali can show "anything" but as an architect, you have real physical constraints.

So, again, Stephen and Merlin without revisiting Kant or the EasyBib Citation Helper, what do you have to say about the topic from your own experience?

I can address some of this as a writer, but I write non-fiction: I report what I find; I don't make it up. So, my experience is limited.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 7/27, 5:17am)

Post 7

Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - 7:14am

Here are some remarks of Rand on Creation and on Artistic Creation. Concerning Rand�s creation of her literary works, one gets a good look into the path of the creation of each one in the series Essays on Ayn Rand�s . . . .

Michael,

I was not in architecture, but I was well primed for Rand�s architectural setting for talking about creation and creators in The Fountainhead.

I began to create when I was fourteen years old. For five years, I designed and built scale models of futuristic automobiles for the annual competition of the Fisher Body Craftsman�s Guild. I designed in clay, then carved the model in poplar wood or cast it in industrial plaster from a form off the clay model. What gripped the boys in the Guild were the exciting futuristic designs they had seen in Guild publications and, of course, their own yearlong creations. Everything Rand said about creation and creators in Fountainhead was true. One�s idea and its execution was the thing.

That was it for the rest of my life to this point�creation. The media would change, I would make the shift from the visual to the linguistic, but the impulse to creation would never rest.

One point goes for creativity in every arena, whether artistic, inventive, scientific (both theoretical and design of experiment), or mathematical. As Merlin mentioned in his article�and this pertains to invention and to creation in science and mathematics�one has to first have prepared one�s mind by learning the field. Yes, today, in order to make real advances, that means going to school. A similar process of preparation is required to be able to create art, as has been elaborated by Robert Beverly Hale.

Creation is a doing thing. I should also notice the remarks of artists Robert Malcolm and Michael Newberry.

Reporting my own processes in making essays or in writing poetry, I would say there is always some amount of semi-free association involved. The development, for non-fiction topics, will be open to following new possibilities that are posed as I learn in my research. The practice of logical connection is creative. So is the making of a logical and interesting presentation. I should mention, too, something I learned from attorneys writing briefs. There is great art in the statement of the facts of the case, at the outset of the brief.

In writing poetry, for me, there is direction of attention to sound and rhythm that is allowed to be far more dominant than in my prose. That special attention is something done, with semantic value riding in follow-up selection and redo. What will be topic and mood may be directed considerably or less so in beginning to open to creation of the poem.

Sometimes original melodies and musical phrases come to me. But I never pursued that, and evidently it is not something I can just turn to and open up the way a composer, with training and practice, could do. When they come, they are expressions of feeling for me, and I wouldn�t be surprised if it were that way for many composers as well.

(Edited by Stephen Boydstun on 7/27, 7:27am)

Post 8

Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - 8:32am

Over the years, I found that people who seek it, find it, by whatever means, and usually several. I also observed that people whom I consider truly creative do not give it much thought. In other words, they are creative, rather than studying (other people's) creativity.
......................

Interesting points, Michael - the act of creativity itself has always been with me, and indeed, for the most part have taken it as a 'given', and as something anyone else COULD do if it were more understood and applied... yet, over the years, I've come to see that it is, in many ways, more elusive than learning to think [which most do to some extent, but most on a VERY haphazardly approach, without the integration factor - itself usually for lack of even knowing of it, let alone its importance to a living being]... thus, for me it has been more a case of what to do with this, how to best apply it such that Saint Saens' phrase 'like plucking an apple off the tree' remains with me, as it has, all my life, and thus never have suffered this so-called 'artist block'... to me, creativity is a natural development of the being's growth in utilizing its intelligence, and those who claim to lack it tend to be those whose growth were stymied or 'beatened out of' by the intensity of conforming to the immediate group and accepted within as a form of personal survival, even as in long term it proved very detrimental...

Post 9

Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - 12:10pm

Maker Faire: if it's made, it's displayed

http://www.makerfaire.com/
http://makerfaire.com/detroit/2010/
http://thehenryford.org/events/makerFaire.aspx

Thank you, Stephen. (I thought that you were a professional architect from a different post on another board. Sorry for missing that. I knew, also, that you have done much else in addition and in that, I was correct.) Thanks, also, Robert.

To elaborate a bit, my observation is that those who are creative do not always have enough tools. In computing programming, we learned several ways to plan a program: Flowcharts, Warnier-Orr, Nassi-Schneiderman, ... but beyond those are fishbones and clouds and entity-action diagrams.... and more. If you have a germ of an idea, you need some way to think it through. Those can help.

But it is the germ of an idea that really is the goal here. That is what "creativity" seeks. "How do you think of that?" Well, I don't know. I mean, I take in a lot all the time and I am always thinking. I never had a model for "thinking" before -- I thought that it was "natural." But it is not. In a Zane Grey story, The First Fast Gun, the hero says that he is not too smart, but he can turn a thing over in his mind and look at it from all sides while staring into a campfire. I got that. It made a difference in my thinking.

But you don't just take a class in "creativity" and get something that was never there. You can learn new tools. A friend who is an artist was thrilled one day in high school when the teacher assigned them to make 3-D alphabet letters (clay or styrofoam or what, I don't know) and he learned a new way to see lettering which he had never considered "an art" before.

Grammatically, for me (as a writer) that is a matter of negation and substitution. I will carry an idea around, changing it, negating the premise or negating the conclusion and wondering what premise would lead to it. I will substitute synonyms or antonyms. I find myself signing songs. But, I agree that, as Pasteur said (and Stephen and Robert echoed), it is the prepared mind that benefits from chance. You have to know the stuff and be open or receptive.

I face the same challenge every month. I have a deadline on the fourth for a column for the ANA "Internet Connections." I have to find something interesting with enough reliable, authoritative websites to fill a page. I have been doing this for seven years, 84 months. I know a lot about the subject (presumably), but some work is better than others. It is not just the pure content -- though there is that -- but also my voice, the intensity or spin or timbre. When an idea has been successful, the article has snap. "Snap" is the technical term that bankers use to describe genuine paper currency as different from counterfeit -- genuine creativity versus making the deadline.

Cary Mullis said that he was in the habit of driving the Sangre de Cristo mountain roads after work, the night air, and all, nothing on his mind, and the driving being automatic, and he would just mentate and ideate about work. That's when PCR (polymerase chain reactions) came to him. That cost him his girlfriend, in fact, because she was in the passenger seat and he realized that if he woke her up to tell her, she would be underwhelmed. But, see, he spent his whole life thinking and doing, trying and discovering.

The opposite of that is the scene in The Fountainhead where Peter Keating decides that he wants to be an artist after all. Unfortunately, he's over 40...

I tried googling for the negative affects of college education on mathematicians, but did not find it. I heard that by the time they get their PhDs,they have spent so much time doing other people's work that they no longer have the edge they did at 17. Anyone?

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 7/27, 12:24pm)

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 7/27, 2:43pm)

Post 10

Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - 6:16pm