In my opinion, Creativity is the act of using one's Imagination to
share your story, solve a problem, or otherwise express a Truth.
Creativity is part of what makes us Human. Sometimes it is taking
someone else's thought, idea, creation, story, etc. and putting your
own bent on it. Often an artist can learn a lot about themselves by
"copying" another artist's work, be it music or a painting or
sculpture, etc. As long as they admit it is a re-creation of someone
else's work I don't have a problem with that at all!
One of my
favorite YouTube videos is a Rant by a guy who used to play the cello
and his struggles with Pachabel's Canon in D. In his rant he points out
that the tune is used in just about every genre of music today! (
http://youtu.be/JdxkVQy7QLM).
I
have three younger sisters and when I was about 8, (and they were 7, 6
and 4) I was always complaining that they were "copying" me. Whether
we were drawing pictures, molding play-doh, painting or telling a story
they would try to draw, mold or paint the same thing and often would
repeat after me like a parrot. If I drew a person holding a flower,
they would also draw a person holding a flower; if I rolled my play-doh
into a snake, they would also roll theirs like a snake; If I said, "I
like pink." someone would invariably say 'I like pink.'; "Where are we
going?" 'where are we going?'; "Stop copying me." 'stop copying me'
etc. And what would my mom do? Nothing! She would say, "Imitation is a
form of flattery." I used to hate that so much! Mostly, because as an 8
year old I didn't understand that they wanted to be just like me
BECAUSE I was their Big Sister.
I caught this TedTalk recently:
http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_brown_on_creativity_and_play.html,
Tim Brown's Talk on Serious Play. In his speech, he says "Fear is what
keeps us from being creative." He is speaking to a room full of
designers, and his thoughts are that when you have Trust and people are
comfortable than they aren't afraid to show their creativity.
Playfulness is important because it helps us make creative solutions.
When adults come upon a new situation we stop and want to put it into a
known category. Whereas a child will come upon the same situation and
think, "What is it? What can I do with it?!?!?!"
Brown states that there are three categories of play that children do that adults can learn from and reuse in the "Real World".
The
first is Exploratory Play, where you go for quantity not quality, he
gave audience members a sheet with 30 circles and gave them one minute
to turn those circles into as many objects as they could. Quantity not
quality. Don't worry about what they look like, just get it down, like
Real Brainstorming!
The second is Building Play, thinking with
your hands and using other objects to solve your problem. Did you know
that the original design for the roller ball mouse came from a roll-on
deodorant? In his company they keep "prototype carts" that are stocked
with paper, play-doh, scissors, glue and other "preschool" supplies on
hand! He pointed out that those items are always available in
preschool but that as kids go through our school systems, they are
taken away.
The last type of play he mentions is Role-Playing,
acting out scenarios to see the problems in a service. He said that we
already have hundreds of social scripts inside our heads from when we
were small. He gives the example of a designer who went to a hospital
emergency room and kept a video tape by his head the whole time so that
the viewer would see everything a typical patient sees - the video has
twenty minutes of the ceiling! Immediately upon watching the video the
viewers can feel empathy and see problems that aren't necessarily
obvious.
He adds that Adults, in our desire to be original [and creative] we actually self-edit ourselves out of fear.
I
agree almost entirely with him. I think that anyone, regardless of
their field of study, can learn a lot through serious play. We can
relearn how to be creative.
