It might help to taboo “creativity”. I know of three major schools of thought on the subject, all of whose definitions I agree with, despite certain of the group(s) claiming that other group(s) are “wrong. ;-)
One group defines creativity in terms of being able to systematically generate novel alternatives for a design problem, or within some target space.
Another defines it in terms of creating… that is, being able to formulate a desired objective in the first place, and pursue a process of bringing it into being by continually comparing and contrasting the desired state with the current state of reality.
A third defines it in terms of fluency—that the mere practice of generating different sequences of output in some medium causes one to develop an intuitive sense of what sequences are likely to be “good” or “bad”. (I don’t know a ton about this group, but I heard someone give a talk once on this, demonstrating how teaching children to generate sequences of the form 1-2-3, 1-3-2, 2-3-1, 2-1-3, 3-1-2, 3-2-1 would allow them to learn interesting things about music and mathematics in a very short period, by changing e.g. pitch and duration of notes.)
All three of these characteristics—the ability to hold a vision, generate alternatives to solve specific problems, and be fluent in the low-level expression of your subject area—seem to be important to any good definition of “creativity”. But quite a lot of materials tend to take on only one of these areas, and then usually some relatively small subset thereof.
It might help to taboo “creativity”. I know of three major schools of thought on the subject, all of whose definitions I agree with, despite certain of the group(s) claiming that other group(s) are “wrong. ;-)
One group defines creativity in terms of being able to systematically generate novel alternatives for a design problem, or within some target space.
Another defines it in terms of creating… that is, being able to formulate a desired objective in the first place, and pursue a process of bringing it into being by continually comparing and contrasting the desired state with the current state of reality.
A third defines it in terms of fluency—that the mere practice of generating different sequences of output in some medium causes one to develop an intuitive sense of what sequences are likely to be “good” or “bad”. (I don’t know a ton about this group, but I heard someone give a talk once on this, demonstrating how teaching children to generate sequences of the form 1-2-3, 1-3-2, 2-3-1, 2-1-3, 3-1-2, 3-2-1 would allow them to learn interesting things about music and mathematics in a very short period, by changing e.g. pitch and duration of notes.)
All three of these characteristics—the ability to hold a vision, generate alternatives to solve specific problems, and be fluent in the low-level expression of your subject area—seem to be important to any good definition of “creativity”. But quite a lot of materials tend to take on only one of these areas, and then usually some relatively small subset thereof.