Week 8 - cre·a·tiv·i·ty (part II)
After investigating the meaning of the term” creativity” and the history of its early uses as well as its Latin roots, I found out that through history the usage of the term itself didn't change according to the context it relates to whether it’s poetry & literature, scientific inventions, art & craftsmanship and even in the 1950s where I found its early uses in the design and design thinking context. The term has always been used to describe:
1. The state or quality of being creative.
2. The ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations etc; originality, progressiveness or imagination: the need for creativity in modern industry; creativity in the performing arts.
3. The process by which one utilizes creative ability.*
This was an important investigation as it showed me the evolution of the term and its relationship to other disciplines such as science and humanities through history to relate that to the education system nowadays.
After the historical investigation, it was time to dive deeper in the theoretical side of creativity. The three major resources I depended on were Designerly Ways of Knowing By Nigel Cross, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Through these three resources, I found 8 key ideas, 3 of them [Balance, Reason/Meaning, Collaboration] relate perfectly to my other contents: education and Design. Those three key ideas are:
In his book FLOW, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to the term “activity” as any activity that stretches the person’s capacity and involves an element of novelty and discovery, like playing chess or climbing a mountain for instance. He also suggests 9 elements of optimal experience of an activity, the third one of them is balance between challenges and skills, and in other words, balance between the opportunities you have vs. the skills you’ve got. This idea relates to education in terms of the students experiences in class in any subject; if they have the skill, and face an equal amount of challenge, then they’ll have optimal experience in learning. As for if a student doesn’t have enough skills and is asked to do a challenge that’s not equal to the skills he has got, he will not get an optimal experience in learning. And Vice-versa, if a student’s skills are much higher than the challenges he faces then it will result to him getting frustrated and eventually not enjoying the learning experience.
Both Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Nigel Cross talked about the reason or the reason of learning anything new. Csikszentmihalyi suggests that the ways of knowing about things and the ways of finding about them are either exotelic (doing things for a later goal) or autotelic (no reason for doing the activity except to feel the experience it provides). Cross contrasted between extrinsic and intrinsic values in the cognitive perspective of education. In other words, children in an early age experience the enjoyment of learning new things and they feel growth by mastering new skills. This intrinsic and autotelic values fades away with time, school and age and transforms into extrinsic and exotelic values as children grow up, so, learning new things or mastering new skills becomes an external imposition and becomes something they have to do and so that enjoyment of learning they had when they were younger disappears. And that is exactly what the current education system is doing to the students. But, it was identified that some activities can achieve the enjoyment of both sides. Csikszentmihalyi gave the example of a violinist to affirm that, as a violinist will be achieving his intrinsic and autotelic values by doing something he enjoys while achieving his extrinsic and exotelic values as in performing.
Another key element of achieving optimal experience as Csikszentmihalyi suggests is collaboration. He affirms that human interaction and the company of others adds to the quality of experience one would have in doing an activity. He also mentioned Emile Durkheim’s “collective effervescence” theory as doing things collaboratively motivates the attention and the focus on what’s being done. And that in return stimulates the awareness and consciousness of the flow in creativity, which is what the current education system somehow lacks.
Next step: new mapping all of this out in relation to education and design + form research questions.
*The Random House Dictionary of the English Language
