Thursday, June 12, 2014

Everything is awesome - creativity part 2

A while ago I watched some videos from a Coursera MOOC (I didn't really do the course as such) on creativity. The Lego Movie is very much about this idea.

The idea behind this MOOC is that everyone is creative, it is just that there are different types of creativity. Emmett is creative in the sense of following formulaic approaches. Now I know what you are thinking, if you follow instructions, it isn't really creativity. But if we leave behind the idea of following instructions like Lego instructions, there are still well constrained areas that permit a lot of creativity.

Music is fairly well constrained in the West. A limited number of scales, and some basic chords based on them. With just three major chords, and maybe a minor chord and a major seventh and you can write a whole lot of songs. Likewise, engineers follow some well constrained principles, perhaps with a lack of creative style - but who cares as long as they stay up!

Genuine creativity is probably less common than we think - newly emergent ideas, processes, styles, theories, etc. This is often done by trying to combine things not normally associated with each other.

I guess the key point is that we can all have rules we follow, and still be creative. Hopefully thinking this way can open up possibilities of doing new things and seeing otherwise more mundane tasks as adventures in making new, creative things.

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