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CREATIVITY | Noah Brier

The Creative Process

What brings some people's creativity to the surface?

August 29, 2005 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 2 COMMENTS

Creativity is one of my favorite topics. I'm fascinated by what makes one person considered creative and another not. I believe that everyone has the inherent abilities to be creative, so what gives some of us the potential and others not? I think Steve Jobs is on to something when he says, "Creativity is just connecting things." However, connecting things is not really something you can just throw around as easy. I mean, everyone can "connect things" in one way or another, and Jobs caveats his statement by talking about connecting diverse experiences, which gets us a bit closer to just what's going on. But the question remains, if everyone can "connect things" and everyone has "diverse experiences" in one way or another, why are only some people considered creative?

I think there are two major steps that stand in between experiences and connecting that explain creativity. The first I'll call digestion. A creative individual doesn't take things at face value, they examine and dig, trying to find meaning, sometimes for a mass audience and sometimes just for their own good. Bruce DeBoer explains it like this in "What makes me creative?" (via Lifehack.org):

Information and experience are like food for the creative process. It's raw substance. Information needs to be digested to brain-fat so it can re-immerge as mature creative energy. It's as if it needs to be inculcated into our souls before we are free to randomize it into original creative expression. If we don't digest it, a creative product – art, innovation, music, etc. – is sure to be more derivative that original. Creativity is using our unique inner selves to rearrange the raw material.
So if diverse experiences are the food, the creative individual digests it by attaching meaning. For those geeks out there, you can think of this as the metadata of the experiences. This allows the creative individual to come back later and search for that raw material using terms and ideas that are easily understandable. Another way to think of this would be as translating the experience into the language of creativity.

Following the digestion/metadata/translation I believe some grouping happens. This is is a lower level process than the "connecting" that ultimately makes someone creative. It's about finding some basic buckets to throw your digesting experience into. In a way this step could be included as part of the basic metadata, and maybe should exist as a step before, but since I'm writing this by the seat of my pants, it exists as step three for now. A simple example of this would be your state of mind as you experience something. For instance, as I sat outside reading Emergence today, I was thinking in the bucket of creativity. In fact, the further I write this, the more I think this basic grouping process is more of a second step than a third, since it really is about the state of mind your in as you have your experience. (Anyway, you get the idea.)

Finally, after you've bucketed and attached your metadata it's time to start connecting. Like I said, anyone can connect, but if you haven't done the previous work, your connections will be less fruitful. Think of it as background research: the more you know before you begin, the more fruitful and efficient you can be when you actually get to working on your project. Now that everything is arranged and prepared, you can easily see where they connect to both each other and to new experiences. Connections seem obvious to a creative person because of this preparation they've done. They're ready to connect everything together.

Which leads me to the final piece of the creativity puzzle: adaptability. I don't think this is necessarily a step in the process as much as it is an overall state. Creative people can adapt to changing environments, in fact, many enjoy this adaptation. They enjoy immersing themselves in topics and ideas that are out of their regular comfort area because they realize they can adapt. When you think about, things outside your regular comfort area are probably only a few connections away anyway. So when you're open to these new ideas and thinking critically about how they may connect to your old ideas and experiences, your creativity can flourish. Adaptability allows people to follow courses that may not seem to obviously connect with the belief that they will eventually find where the two roads merge. Without this constant openness/adaptability, the process I've laid out can't succeed.

As expected, it all works together.

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COMMENTS

1jeff

Okay, well I have a great deal to say on this topic. Primarily, because I think an academic, logic-based, almost scientific examination of "creativity" defeats the purpose of being creative.

The primary reason (though there are many more) I don't like the analysis you've proposed is because at no point do you use the word "imagination".

I saw an evening of plays written by grammar school children, 6th grade and below. A third grader wrote a story of two giant kangaroos who just wanted to eat pizza and fight. After a bad fight in the bathroom of an Italian restaurant, they decide fighting is pointless and go to Jamaica where they play songs with their banjos on the beach.

I also don't know if you think there is a fundamental difference between "creative" and "artistic". Because it complicates the issue....

So much of academia is about semantics.

August 29, 2005

2Noah Brier

I see your problem and suggest reading the linked article "What makes me creative?" which sets up an interesting difference between the creativity of a child and that of an adult.

As for the logic-based definition of creativity standing in opposition to the purpose of being creative, I disagree. What I am setting up here is that it's possible for someone to make themselves more creative. There are things you can do to open up your mind (and imagination). I by no means think this is the singular process, but rather a set of steps that can lead to improved creativity.

As for the distinction between creative and artistic, I strongly believe it's merited. Creativity can be used in non-artistic way. I can find a creative method to fix my sink which I doubt you'd call artistic. Often creative individuals are artistic because that's how they chose to output their creative. However, there are also creative individuals who become scientists, discovering unknown cures because their creativity led them down yet undiscovered paths.

In the article I mentioned about, DeBoer explains it like this: "Somewhere around puberty we accumulate enough junk in our minds that we need to organize it: make it linear. Random thought is no longer an efficient way to make it through the day and stay sane. Most of us lay down our crayons. Those who don't surrender, usually become artists, musicians, fashion designers or advertising art directors who wander through the desert waiting for rain."

While I have laid this out as a process, I don't mean it that way. They are pieces of a whole, arranged however you feel comfortable. What I was trying to represent, however, was that involved in creativity are both higher and lower level functions. To develop creative ideas eventually involves evaluating, which in and of itself sets up a hierarchy.

What's interesting that I haven't written about here is how these ideas were influenced by both brain science and emergent behavior. While you brain is a big network, it relies on hierarchies to function properly. It's this relation between the two that I was trying to communicate. Creativity is a bottom-up process. If that wasn't clear, I apologize.

August 29, 2005