This week's lecture covers "Creativity" again, but this time, we see how an invention that came from a creative idea or innovated from existing idea can be something of novelty value. Or not.
Debates of what situations or conditions can creativity be recognized had been going on because
of different perceptions towards the matter.
Mr. Mustaffa has shown us quite a lot of quotes from various people. I'll share some of them now, which really just explains themselves. Since the slides haven't been uploaded in MMLS, I can only share a handful of them.
"Being creative is seeing the same thing as everybody else but thinking of something different" (Shekerjian D., 1990)I can't remember the full quote of some of them, but in
1996, Amabile said that
creativity do not have one definite meaning or a definition. And that creativity is a subject that is unknown and unknowable."Creativity means doing something which is first of all unusual" (Coleman.,Kaufman & Ray, 1992)"The novel idea that create changes to the culture is known as creativity in a capital 'C'." (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1996)"A creation is something original that has value" (Haggins, 1995)Robert Epstein and
Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi argued that creativivity can and should be taught, the other insist that cultures can tolerate only a handful of creative people in each generation.
Some said that if a person's creativity and inventions are not shared to others, but only to himself, he cannot be recognized as a creative person, as he did not contribute to the society.
As an example by Mr. Mustaffa, if a person sings in the shower, writing his own song in his head and only performing it for himself, can he be considered a creative person?
That really depends on subjective views. I personally think that even if a person do not share their creations to the public, they're still creative. Everybody is creative by nature, depending on whether they exercise that. I shared my view on this in the previous post.
While creativity is the process of generating new ideas, innovation is to make changes to existing ideas by the method of reshuffling, modifying, etc.
A quote from today's lecture that efficiently explains the meaning of innovation:
"Innovation is the process of turning ideas into practical reality."Another interesting quote from the lecture,
"Sternberg proposed that there is a dialectical relationship between intelligence wisdom and creativity."The above statement is supported and explained by
Dickhut. JE , "A creative and intelligent person may produce a novel idea, but without wisdom, the novel idea may be 'foolish' and inappropriate."Edward de Bono stated that "Creativity is not 'natural' to human brain therefore a thinking skill needs to be developed in order to be creative."This is something that I've stressed upon in my previous post. Creativity is something that can be trained and developed, and that creativity is not something that only exist in a few gifted individuals.
Edward de Bono build up a picture of a 'special-memory-surface' which resemble the mechanism of brain in selecting, processing and rejecting of info.As Mr. Mustaffa mentioned in class, we need to focus on the main problem instead of being distracted by a lot of other inputs.
Next point is
Defining Novelty.
Novelty is the quality or value something new has.
However
, this depends on subjective perception of every individual.
Subjective novelty is the perception of something as being new by an individual or a group of people. Okay, what I understand from that is that: if your invention is something new that you'd came up with, and created; AND it is recognized as something new by someone, it has subjective novelty value. As there are people who deemed it as a creative idea. However, there will be others who recognize the invention as something that had already once been created.
Objective novelty is something that is new for all humanity in its development through ages.Well, on the other hand, instead of being recognized by one person of a group of people; if a creative idea is recognized world wide and bring changes to the culture it has objective novelty value.
The standard of originality in a creation is always changing through time as new inventions are made. Just like how creativity is based on what have been created before. No matter how the idea is new to the inventor, if it has already been presented to the world, it is not original.
In my opinion, this depends on how people view originality. As long as a person come up with an idea, to me it's original. However, my impression of the brilliance of that idea fades if the same idea has been seen before.
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