Creativity
Creativity is the ability to form novel and valuable ideas or works using one's imagination. Products of creativity may be intangible, or a physical object.
Creativity may also describe the ability to find new solutions to problems or new methods to accomplish a goal. Therefore, creativity enables people to solve problems in new ways.
Most ancient cultures lacked the concept of creativity, seeing art as a form of discovery rather than a form of creation. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, creativity is seen as the sole province of God, and human creativity was considered an expression of God's work; the modern conception of creativity came about during the Renaissance, influenced by humanist ideas.
Scholarly interest in creativity is found in several disciplines, primarily psychology, business studies, and cognitive science. It is also present in education and the humanities.
Etymology
The English word "creativity" comes from the Latin term creare. Its derivational suffixes also come from Latin. The word "create" appeared in English as early as the 14th century—notably in Chaucer's The Parson's Tale to indicate divine creation. The modern meaning of creativity in reference to human creation did not emerge until after the Age of Enlightenment.Definition
In a summary of scientific research into creativity, psychology professor Michael Mumford wrote, "We seem to have reached a general agreement that creativity involves the production of novel, useful products." Similarly, in psychologist Robert Sternberg's words, creativity produces "something original and worthwhile".Authors have diverged dramatically in their precise definitions beyond these general commonalities: social geographer Peter Meusburger estimated that over a hundred different definitions can be found in the literature. One definition given by Dr. E. Paul Torrance in the context of assessing an individual's creative ability is "a process of becoming sensitive to problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies; identifying the difficulty; searching for solutions, making guesses, or formulating hypotheses about the deficiencies: testing and retesting these hypotheses and possibly modifying and retesting them; and finally communicating the results."
Philosophy professor Ignacio L. Götz, following the etymology of the word, argued that creativity is not necessarily "making". He confined it to the act of creating without thinking about the end product. While many definitions of creativity seem almost synonymous with originality, Götz also emphasized the difference between creativity and originality. Götz asserted that one can be creative without necessarily being original. When someone creates something, they are certainly creative at that point, but they may not be original in the sense that their creation is not something new.
Creativity in general is usually distinguished from innovation in particular, where the emphasis is on implementation. Academics and authors Teresa Amabile and Michael Pratt defined creativity as the production of novel and useful ideas and innovation as the implementation of creative ideas, while the OECD and Eurostat stated that "innovation is more than a new idea or an invention; an innovation requires implementation, either by being put into active use or by being made available for use by other parties, firms, individuals, or organizations."
There is also emotional creativity, which is described as a pattern of cognitive abilities and personality traits related to originality and appropriateness in emotional experience.
Conceptual history
Ancient
Most ancient cultures, including Ancient Greece, Ancient China, and Ancient India, lacked the concept of creativity, seeing art as a form of discovery and not creation. The ancient Greeks had no terms for "to create" or "creator" except for the expression , which only applied to and to the . Plato did not believe in art as a form of creation. He asks in the Republic, "Will we say of a painter that he makes something?" He answers, "Certainly not, he merely imitates."It is commonly argued that the notion of "creativity" originated in Western cultures through Christianity, as a matter of divine inspiration. According to scholars, the earliest Western conception of creativity was the Biblical story of the creation given in Genesis. However, this is not creativity in the modern sense, which did not arise until the Renaissance. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, creativity was the sole province of God; humans were not considered to have the ability to create something new except as an expression of God's work. A similar concept existed in Greek culture, where the Muses were seen as mediating inspiration from the gods. Romans and Greeks invoked the concept of an external creative "daemon" or "genius", linked to the sacred or the divine. However, none of these views are similar to the modern concept of creativity, and the rejection of creativity in favor of discovery and the belief that individual creation was a conduit of the divine would dominate the West until the Renaissance and even later.
Renaissance
It was during the Renaissance that creativity was first conceived not as a conduit from the divine, but as arising from the abilities of "great men." This could be attributed to the leading intellectual movement of the time, aptly named humanism, which developed an intensely anthropocentric outlook on the world, valuing the intellect and achievement of the individual. From this philosophy arose the Renaissance man, an individual who embodies the principles of humanism in their ceaseless courtship with knowledge and creation. One of the most well-known and immensely accomplished examples is Leonardo da Vinci.From the 17th to the 19th centuries
However, the shift from divine inspiration to the abilities of the individual was gradual and would not become immediately apparent until the Age of Enlightenment. By the 18th century, creativity linked with the concept of imagination became more frequent. In the writing of Thomas Hobbes, imagination became a key element of human cognition. William Duff was one of the first to identify imagination as a quality of genius, typifying the separation being made between talent and genius.As an independent topic of study, creativity received little attention until the 19th century. Psychologist Mark Runco and Robert Albert argue that creativity as the subject of proper study began seriously to emerge in the late 19th century with the increased interest in individual differences inspired by the arrival of Darwinism. In particular, they refer to the work of Francis Galton, who, through his eugenicist outlook, took a keen interest in the heritability of intelligence, with creativity taken as an aspect of genius.
Modern
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, leading mathematicians and scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz and Henri Poincaré began to reflect on and publicly discuss their creative processes. The insights of Poincaré and von Helmholtz were built on early accounts of the creative process by pioneering theorists such as Graham Wallas and Max Wertheimer. In his work Art of Thought, published in 1926, Wallas presented one of the first models of the creative process. In the Wallas model, creative insights and illuminations may be explained by a process consisting of five stages:- preparation,
- incubation,
- intimation,
- illumination or insight ;
- verification.
Wallas considered creativity to be a legacy of the evolutionary process, which allowed humans to quickly adapt to rapidly changing environments. Simonton provides an updated perspective on this view in his book, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity.
In 1927, mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, later published as Process and Reality. He is credited with having coined the term "creativity" to serve as the ultimate category of his metaphysical scheme.
Although psychometric studies of creativity had been conducted by The London School of Psychology as early as 1927 with the work of H.L. Hargreaves into the Faculty of Imagination. The formal psychometric measurement of creativity, from the standpoint of orthodox psychological literature, is usually considered to have begun with psychologist J.P. Guilford's address to the American Psychological Association in 1950. That address helped to popularize the study of creativity and to focus attention on scientific approaches to conceptualizing creativity. Statistical analyzes led to the recognition of creativity as an aspect of human cognition separate from IQ-type intelligence, under the study of which it had previously been subsumed. Guilford's work suggested that above a threshold level of IQ, the relationship between creativity and classically measured intelligence broke down.