Time to Review

“BRD209: Creativity and Innovation” has been a very interesting unit to say the least. It has made me think about things that I never thought I would ponder and shined a new light on this idea of creativity. At the beginning of the unit I was very sceptical as to whether or not it was a good idea signing up for this madness, although as the weeks progressed I began to become less and less confused and more intrigued about the next week to come. When we started assessing creativity and innovation in practice it became easier for me to relate everything we had previously looked at to real life situations and scenarios.

The assessments for the unit have been surprisingly more organised that I anticipated and actually related a lot to the content we have been learning. Assessment 1 really got my creative juices flowing so to speak, and forced me to actually think of new and curious ideas to talk about. Although on reflection I do wish I had been more outrageous in Part B and come up with a completely insane innovation. Assessment 2, the mind map followed by a short explanation was actually really fun, and allowed us to apply our personal creativity to a real life problem. In hindsight I was very practical with what I decided to do with the area and could have again been a bit more creative.Assessment 3 looks like it will again be a fun assignment. Getting to collaborate with other students and work in a group will be great as we will be able to bounce our creative ideas off each other, and maybe even combine them to an extent to formulate the ultimate idea.

Overall this unit was better than I anticipated and I would recommended it to anyone who isn’t sure on what breadth unit to take. J

Storytime

So according to TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), the invite-only event where the worlds leading thinkers gather to find inspiration and share their stories; this is the formula to a good presentation:

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before.
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods,
   thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast
   Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.

Commandment number 4 relates directly back to Topic 8 of the unit, storytelling. This topic aimed at outlining how important stories are for creating new ideas. Without stories, there is no inspiration or no roads to a new and innovate thought. As the lecture progressed I began to completely agree with this statement. Without storytelling where would the world be today? Our own civilisations history is only known to us today because of past generations storytelling. Information, morals and wisdom could only be transferred from one generation to the next through oral or written storytelling.

I believe that storytelling is the fundamental reason we are able to learn from the mistakes (or not learn in some cases) from the previous generation in a hope to improve our own lives as well as the lives of future generations. In todays day and age storytelling is mostly done via social media, be it Facebook or Instagram, everyone is posting aspects of their personal story at one time or another. Or in the case of Snapchat, where there is a “My Story” function people can literally be watching your story on a day to day basis (in reality they are probably not going to have any innovative ideas watching mine). Just because we now tell our stories in a different way doesn’t mean the same principles don’t apply. Everything on the Internet is here to stay and future generations will be able to absorb so many stories from so many people at the tough of a button. Ensuring that creativity and innovation is here to stay.

Using Creativity and Innovation to Save the World?

The use of creativity and innovation to ‘save the world’ seems like one of the most absurd and unachievable things. I disagree, I am not saying one can simple come up with one marvelous idea to solve all of the worlds problems, but we will not solve anything without trying. I believe the key to bettering the world we live in is to solve one problem at a time using creative and innovate ideas. The environment, and how we can do our part to save it is an ever-pressing issue in today society. One of the ways mankind can help the environment is through our advanced understanding of it, combined with our wonderful resource that is technology.

One example of a creative idea that helps the world is the use of artificial structures to assist in rehabilitating the natural world. One innovative idea I admire in particular is the use of artificial reefs, to provide high-quality habitat for marine life in areas where man is destroying the natural reefs. This has a sense of poetic justice; we are the ones causing the destruction of marine habitat in the first place, so we need to find a solution to this problem.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has recently set out at creating one of the largest artificial reefs to date. It will consist of 500 concrete pyramids that are specifically designed for marine life. The artificial reef will be placed in the state-controlled water off of the Gulf of Mexico. It is just the first stage of this very ambitious artificial reef project. This reef is essential to thousands of species of marine life situated in the Gulf of Mexico, and without this innovate plan many of those animals would not survive. This is just one example that shows just how important human creativity and innovation is to the world around us and without it many species of animals would not still be around.

Creativity will Rise from the Rubble

Is it possible for creative people to congregate in certain towns or cities, making those places creative hotspots of the world? Howittravel.com listed “The 9 Most Creative Cities of 2016” and the city of Christchurch from my home country of New Zealand was 4^th of the list. Christchurch has the most unique story out of all the cities; it was devastated by a series of large earthquakes in 2010 and 2011, which completely destroyed the city centre. From this tragedy “innovation and creativity has risen, breathing life back into New Zealand’s garden city”.

http://www.howitravel.co/most-creative-cities-2016/?ref=thank-you

The opportunity to fully design a city centre from scratch is any urban planners dream (or nightmare) and so the city searched high and low to find the perfect team of creative and innovate young minds to being rebuilding this once great city. In 2016 rebuilding a city means a smart, technologically advanced and connected city is easily achievable. An interactive app was developed, where the user walked around the city and was able to discover, and learn about all of the old buildings that once stood there and keep up to date track in real-time of the reconstruction process. This allowed locals to become more involved in the rebuilding of their city and track its progress.

I think that even though what happened to Christchurch was a complete disaster, it really allowed the creativity of the city and the nation to flourish. Be it thinking of unique and effective ways to fundraise for those impacted by the quake, or coming up with ideas for quick housing and schooling, everyone pitched in their creativity and innovation to assist in making the city whole again.

What if Creativity Doesn’t Exist??

Just when I thought the concept of creativity was becoming slightly easier to understand, and I even began to believe I had more creativity than first thought, I watched Kirby Ferguson’s documentary “Embrace the Remix” at TED. In the video Ferguson explains that creativity doesn’t actually exist, instead we are consciously or sub-consciously taking an idea and producing different variations of it across the generations. He beings to further state that nothing is created a new, instead everything is copied and transformed using 3 key principles.

Prior Idea+Knowledge/understanding= Creativity

 Kirby makes a statement outlining that nobody start out with original ideas, we need to have adequate knowledge and understanding first, and build upon this to create something better. Basically saying that everything is in fact a remix of something else. I guess this does make sense to some extent, for us to think of ideas to problems for example, we first need to know as much as we can about the problem in order to logically tackle solving it. Without prior understanding of the problem it would be like asking a 6 year old to solve global warming, yet they don’t know anything about weather, let alone global climate. Now that I have looked into this side of creativity I am unsure where I stand, does it really exist? Or are we just continuously transforming ideas from the previous generation?

Renovating the Thought Process

 

Is it possible to change the way we think in order to become more creative? This was the question addressed by topic 3 of this unit. I do agree the “Breaking free from the life of a zombie” might lead to someone becoming more creative and causing people to think ‘more’ about what they are doing instead of just simply existing.

I liked the idea of adding a touch of “randomness” to our everyday lives. I do not mean randomness like getting on a strange bus and seeing where it will take you, but something along the lines of a random article generator to learn something new and perhaps gain creative spark from. I also agree that communicating more with other people is a way to change the way we think and perhaps gain some innovation from something we otherwise would not have heard. This relates back to communication and collaboration being important across all fields where finding creative solutions to problems is the ultimate goal.

The six thinking hats (Edward de Bono, 1985) is a great tool that breaks different styles of thinking in 6 categories. Now I am not saying each individual falls into only one hat (or should I say wears one hat) but that it is more than likely a person is a mixture of 2 or more hats, and therefore has a unique way of thinking. I myself could be a combination of different hats at any given time depending on the situation. I like the idea that I am mostly a yellow hat, and focus on positive points, often I find myself looking on the optimistic side of any situation, focusing on logical reasons for positivity and not dwelling on any negativity. I find I am least like the Blue hat, I often do not plan things out or have great organisation when taking any sort of action.

Myself vs Creativity

If creativity could be placed on a scale from 1-100, with 1 being a robot and 100 being the most creative person on the planet, I would place myself at around the 65 mark. I’ve never considered myself an extremely creative person but this is often due to constant self-criticism and extreme lack of confidence. I am very open-minded and like to think I do have a creative streak that just does not get brought out very often. After watching the lecture I considered that maybe some external factors could also be limiting my creativity. The thought of being judged or ridiculed in a situation is something that would stop my creativity right in its track.

 

After watching “Do schools kill creativity?” by Ken Robinson one particular line resinated with me“ If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original”. This relates to how children are never afraid to get something wrong, and therefore they are all extremely creative. He then goes on to discuss how people do not grow into creativity; instead we all grow out of it. I whole-heartedly agree with this statement, as I child I was much more creative than I am now. I believe this is because schools do indeed teach us that it is bad to be wrong, and therefore children gradually become accustomed to being afraid to get an answer wrong or a question wrong, thus creativity is slowly lost as we grow up. Maybe if I start becoming less afraid of being ‘wrong’ I can work on improving my overall creativity (if that’s even possible).

Creativity in the Flesh

Creativity, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary is “The use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness.” So to better understand creativity we should first work out what is meant by imagination. Imagination is referred to as “The faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses” This is becoming somewhat repetitive now, how can use our ability to form new ideas to in turn, form new ideas. Any sane person would start to question this concept of ‘creativity’ and begin wondering if it really exists.

I myself have never really thought about the matter and have always just assumed everyone is creative to an extent, everyone has the ability to create something new, just that some people posses this magical ability more than others. Surely creativity comes in all different forms, many people might directly express it through art, crafts and inventing, while others may be indirectly creative in everyday life. They could be performing tasks that require certain aspects of creativity and not even realise it. I hope that signing up to this unit was a good ‘idea’, and that I will improve my comprehension on the topic of creativity and hopefully I will leave this unit feeling a lot less confused than I do now.