Creative Creativity: Inspiration and Tools for Creativity

Using What You Already Have - PlayPumps

In some parts of the world, getting water to people is a huge problem. The water is usually a fair distance away from the village and possibly contaminated. Even though there is water under the ground, they don't have the electricity or full necessary to pump it to the surface. PlayPumps came up with an amazingly clever solution. Instead of trying to lug a big diesel engine in constant need of fuel to each village, they looked for possible sources of energy that were already there.  They decided to use the energy of children's play to collect water.

It's a good reminder to creative folks, instead of introducing a new element to solve a problem, have you really used what's already there?

The Science of Creativity: How Do I Tell If I'm Creative?

StoryRobot sent me this article from Scientific American that describes current, well 2005 current, scientific thinking about creativity. It covers a lot of ground, talking about left brain/right brain component, how intelligence and creativity are unconnected and how to test for creativity.

Here are the criteria they list as indicators of creativity:

Ideational fluency. The number of ideas, sentences and associations a person can think of when presented with a word.

Variety and flexibility. The diversity of different solutions a person can find when asked to explore the possible uses of, say, a newspaper or a paper clip.

Originality. The ability to develop potential solutions other people do not reach.

Elaboration. The skill to formulate an idea, expand on it, then work it into a concrete solution.

Problem sensitivity. The ability to recognize the central challenge within a task, as well as the difficulties associated with it.

Redefinition. The capacity to view a known problem in a completely different light.

That's a great list. The exercises and tips I post are usually aimed at a way to trick your brain into either letting the left brain run free or in developing one or more of the traits on this list.

The one thing they leave off of this list is actually doing something with your creative impulses. Creation and creativity are defined by action. You can say someone is smart even if they never do anything with it. Can you call someone creative who never creates anything?

Are there any indicators you would add to the list?

Link to article

Discover Magazine Web Archive

Discover, a science magazine, has posted all their articles since 1992 online for free. Some great stuff, including this article on synesthesia and its relationship to consciousness and art. This is such a great advertising for them, I hope more magazines follow their example.

The Discover Archives

Scientific Research That Proves Artists See The World Differently

From Cognitive Daily an article about how we see the world. They report on a study that tracked the eye movement of two groups, artists and psychologists, as they looked at photographs. The psychologists tended to look only at the object that was the focus of the picture while the artists tended to look at the picture as a whole.

The conclusion:

So why do artists look at pictures -- especially non-abstract pictures -- differently from non-artists? Vogt and Magnussen argue that it comes down to training: artists have learned to identify the real details of a picture, not just the ones that are immediately most salient to the perceptual system, which is naturally disposed to focusing on objects and faces.

A good article followed by interesting discussion in the comment section.

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