Creativity unwrapped: discover what creativity is

1. Introduction: the world around us is a fascinating place. It is filled with this place of people's ingenuity, inventiveness and imagination. They're doing on street corners. They define our fashions, the color, our language and forge our beliefs. They connect us even when continents apart. They move mountains for the stuff civilizations built upon That's that even create energy from thin air. All of these wonders owe their existence to a fundamental aspect of human nature. Our creativity. Hello, I'm Kevin. Creativity is something that makes me tick. I love the feeling you get when you see something new and you go Wow, Ingenious. How did they come up with that? I love the thrill of discovering the method in people's madness. The project for this class is to uncover your creative traits. In this session we unwrap what creativity is, but it means we look at different definitions that we uncover what is creative. You Let's get started 2. Common ideas of creativity: So what is creativity exactly? Where does it come from? As do I have much picked as you? More often than not, creativity is associated with what artists do. They certainly create things paintings, sculptures, plays, music, often colorful or beautiful things, sometimes controversial things. But is the mere act of producing these works really creativity? Manet painted many pictures of water lilies, repeating a similar scene again and again and again. If practice and repetition on campus is creative, what about a skilled worker on the production? Nine. Forming a component again and again and again? What about inventors? Their creative right, Dyson invented a new type of vacuum. It uses a cyclone of hair to extract dust without the loss of suction that traditional machines suffered from. This cyclone process was common in industrial extractors. He took that idea from the factory on Successfully adapted it for use in the home is borrowing an existing idea for a new use? Creativity? And what about scientists? They can't be creative, are they? Einstein famously used thought experiments to advance his thinking by imagining himself dropping to the floor for floating inside a sealed elevator in space. He deduced that gravity and acceleration with the same thing. This helped shape his general theory of relativity. So is creativity disability to fantasize? Maybe it is. The Oxford English Dictionary describes creativity as the use of imagination or original ideas to create something. Inventiveness. What does that really mean? Is creativity a characteristic of the person? Is there a creative type, or is it their thinking process? Can anybody think creatively by following certain rules? Or is creativity a characteristic off? The result, that is, does it describe the idea, concept or product? And what about the creative environment? Was context, effect creativity? 3. Scientific perspectives: creativity is a hot topic, and these are exactly the questions that have been investigated by almost every field, from psychology to business. Let's start unwrapping some of those now. There are two concepts that together have become widely accepted as defining what creativity is their best summed up with this sentence Creativity. Is the production off something novel and useful? Another way of saying it is creativity requires both originality. Andi effectiveness. Nothing earth shattering sofa newness or originality, then is seen as fundamental to creativity, basically bringing a previously unknown idea into the world. You could justifiably ask, novel or original to whom agriculture, for example, originated completely independently in many parts of the world at different times like the eastern Mediterranean, China and Peru, among others was novelty at play every single time, only the first time agriculture was developed. Similarly, you could ask How new does new have to be to be creative Raiders novelty lie in Manet's repeated copies off Lilies or Dyson's Borrowed s Cyclone. The second concept in this definition is one of usefulness or sometimes called effectiveness. The novel idea should also be worthwhile or valuable somehow a truly random process like monkeys on a typewriter will generate something that is original but only original. Useful usefulness could be anything from adequate in solving a problem to economic value. But this is controversial. Many people feel usefulness and value are too subjective. Judgments can change over time. But to Charlie, for example, is an Italian Renaissance painter who was all but forgotten and ignored until centuries after his death, when some experts started to attribute the beginnings of modern art to his work. Bankoff is another example, not a single one of his paintings sold while he was alive. Look at him now. Value, then, is just a matter of taste. Intention is sometimes brought into the mix. Instead, for something to be creative, it needs to have been intentional. It should not have been produced through pure chance. Accidentally knocking a pot of paint onto a canvas does not make the resulting artwork creative. Oh, does it? And a cell in Teflon Viagra microwave ovens, X rays, Plato superglue on. Of course, the slinky, but all accidents some people add surprised to the definition. Being original is not enough. A new idea should also be surprising. In other words, something that isn't obvious or commonly deduced. This approach has parallels with the U. S patent office, who say to receive a patent, a proposal must have three characteristics. It must be new. It must be useful on it must be non obvious. 4. Personality types: So what have we learned? Creativity is producing something OK so far, there's something must be novel or new, at least to someone. If it's surprising or not obvious, that's even better. It should be useful or valuable. Whoever might be the judge of that and it probably shouldn't be an accident or it could be on. That's great, too. OK, but what about the person who produced it? Is there such a thing as a creative type? The first thing to say here is that the old concepts around left brain and right brain thinking have been completely debunked. Recent research scanning your own activity reveals that the idea creation process uses many regions of the brain together in unison. Creativity does not involve a single brain region or a single side of the brain. It uses the whole brain, or at least lots of it simultaneously. Creativity is the mind joining desperate dots, synapses, firing concepts, merging and coalescing. Brains are good at that. They put any nonsense together to see if it fits. Think of some of your dreams. There are no left brain, people, right brain people, just whole brain people. What about personality types? Is there anything that distinguishes creative people from non creative people here again, psychologist differ greatly in their opinions. Some research does suggest that people who are deemed creative often hold contradictory traits. For example, Ridge of people tend to be smart, yet naive. At the same time, they combined playfulness and discipline. They can alternate between fantasy and reality. Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted. They're humble and proud. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. What are the contradictions in your personality? I think we all have some. 5. Creative habits: Another useful perspective, maybe, is to look at how these traits manifest themselves in the real world, according to psychologists. Here are some of the things that artists, writers and innovators do differently. They daydream. They are intellectually playful, that curious about many things. They have passions on. Do they follow them? They seek out new experiences. They ask big questions. They connects dots on and they shake things up. They people watch. They get out of their own heads. They move their perspectives. They take time for solitude on mindfulness. To what extent do any of these describe you? I suspect at least one or two of them are familiar, Right? Maybe creativity is less a personality trait on more and mindset A. Not to shoot how you approach a situation. How does the saying go steal like an inventor? Practice like an artist? Dream like a scientist? Oh no, something like that anyway. So creative people do exhibit certain qualities many of the same qualities that all of us do. More than anything, creative types adopt behaviors or skills that help them to be, well, creative. We could all learn to do them, too. We can practice them better anthem. Anyone could do it 6. Class project: creativity and you: Let's return to our question. What is creativity? How would you define it? Let's take a few minutes now to devise our own definition. In a second, I'll ask you to pause the video on scribbled down your thoughts. Take a sheet of paper. A forest fine in the top half as big as you can. Draw a three by three grid in the middle box, right Me or do a selfie if you prefer ons below the great right to me, Creativity is first from what you don't so far. Think about what your creative qualities could be. Fill up the eight boxes with eight words or pictures that come to mind when you think about creativity. And you What are your conflicting traits? Are you resourceful? Are you a dreamer? Are you analytical? Don't think too hard. Just whatever pops into your head. Jot it down. Stop. When you have something in all eight boxes. These are some of your creative strengths. Then complete the sentence in no more than 20 words. To me, creativity is Are you ready? Pose now to stop. Okay. Time's up. How did you get on? Of course there is no right or wrong answer here. As you've seen, even the experts have different views. But hopefully you've found the exercise somewhat insightful. Here's my attempt as an illustration. I'm a dreamer and I'm curious. I'm naive, But I'm also mindful. I'm forgiving Andi. I'm playful. I'm passionate about photography on nature. To me, creativity is trying differently. Or maybe to me, creativity is searching for better. 7. Conclusion: Well, I hope you've enjoyed this class, which, in the creativity doesn't have a fixed meaning, usefulness, novelty and the surprising can all be important elements. But ultimately, it's mindsets and behaviours that make people creative. Diesel things that we can learn and we can practice on. We can get better at. We all do some of these things already, and you've made a very good start at identifying the ones that make you creative. I've been Kevin. Thank you so much for watching keep on creating.