On Creativity
Posted on November 15, 2013 | posted by:I remember starting design school four years ago. It seems like there was a different view of design then. When telling my friends I was accepted, most of their initial reactions were ‘Oh, wow!’ – as if I held a rare and exceptional talent. I was creative. When I showed my mom my acceptance letter, she told me that she didn’t doubt it for a second, because I always had been creative. But what does that even mean? I know I’ve always loved drawing, though I’m not sure it makes me more creative than anyone else. It was an outlet, a hobby, now it has become a great tool for communication.
Was I born this way? Or was I just less prone to be affected by the linear thinking of our school system?
For a long time the design process seemed mythical, almost magical to the outsider, and to no surprise. But the role of the designer has shifted; s/he is no longer an omnipotent creator of objects that stimulates material needs. Instead, design has started approaching intangible problems – we see it as services and systems. Design and everyday technology became inseparable over the years and for everyone to own. We understand that design goes beyond products and that an interface or strategy can be a design. We buy products because they are good designs.
Now, apparently, we are all designers. We are all creative. We talk about ‘good design’, ‘innovative firms’ and ‘creativity’ all the time. The cultism of Apple’s innovation seems to have no end. TED, the holy grail of intellectual quick fixes has over 100 talks tagged creativity and a decade ago we even started talking about ‘the creative class’ in sociology. Motorola is currently running an ad campaign for their new phone called ‘Moto X – designed by you’, but what it really means is that you get to choose the color of the back cover and accessories.
How on earth did that qualify as design? Customizing is not designing.
For some reason this really gets to me. While we may all have creative, unfolded potential, we are not all designers. Designing is a lot of work. Hard work. Sometimes even boring work. There are no finished ideas magically appearing out of nowhere. As everything else it is a process.
Sir Ken Robinson, a dedicated educationalist and frequent TED-conference speaker, makes a good point. We need to reframe education, and move away from the solution focused, linear thinking that only applies if you wish to pursue science. But non-linear thinking is not the same as creativity. Creativity is not the solution to any problem you or we might face. Calling it creativity and offering it as way to get to a solution only takes the focus from the real issue, which is the way we approach and think about problems.
The Britannica Encyclopedia defines creativity as: ”… the ability to make or otherwise bring into existence something new, whether a new solution to a problem, a new method or device, or a new artistic object or form.” The word creativity is fluffy, abstract and so differently understood and defined. So let’s stop glorifying the designer and trivialize the word design, which is strangely contradicting. Let’s stop placing creativity on a pedestal and instead ask ourselves why we are taught to think the way we do.
For some reason I stopped drawing when I started high school. Ironically and for still unknown reasons, I decided to major in science – but that’s a different story.