Creativity
Going on from the absurd copyright thread....
I have seen people on websites claim that creativity can be taught. I dispute that.
I can (and have) teach people to program. I can teach the theory and practice behind it. How do you teach someone to be a natural problem solver?
I can (and have) teach people to use photoshop, with all the tools available, best practices with colours, etc, but you can't teach people to create a good design, Without naming anyone, there is one person on this forum that is a natural graphic designer - yet that person has had no training and no access to professional tools....
I know all of the techniques to sing - I can sing in tune... yet I can't produce anything anyone wants to hear. I can write lyrics and am reasonable with music, but won't ever create anything anyone want's to listen to.
I have an excellent grasp of the English language, but it's doubtful I will produce anything anyone will read...
To me, creativity comes from within you, and your brain works differently (the more creative you are, the more nuts you are)
Discuss....
I have seen people on websites claim that creativity can be taught. I dispute that.
I can (and have) teach people to program. I can teach the theory and practice behind it. How do you teach someone to be a natural problem solver?
I can (and have) teach people to use photoshop, with all the tools available, best practices with colours, etc, but you can't teach people to create a good design, Without naming anyone, there is one person on this forum that is a natural graphic designer - yet that person has had no training and no access to professional tools....
I know all of the techniques to sing - I can sing in tune... yet I can't produce anything anyone wants to hear. I can write lyrics and am reasonable with music, but won't ever create anything anyone want's to listen to.
I have an excellent grasp of the English language, but it's doubtful I will produce anything anyone will read...
To me, creativity comes from within you, and your brain works differently (the more creative you are, the more nuts you are)
Discuss....
Post edited by Lee Fogarty on
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Discounts available for firemen.
<insert obvious sarcastic comment here>
:)
:lol:
I don't believe you are born with natural talents, but as we develop through all external influences our brains become hard-wired in certain ways. You also have to factor in emotional intelligence which gives great input to creativity and the ability to see past your own eyelids. People who vote UKIP have very low emotional intelligence. If you have no sense of rhythm or can't sing in tune forget music. The only exception to this is Mark E. Smith, and you wouldn't want to be trapped in a lift with him either.
I once met a chap who designed shop windows for Top Shop. He had just been paid thousands of pounds to draw some pictures like a child would to illustrate a kids clothing line. Why didn't they just ask a seven year old kid to draw some houses and a stick person flying a kite instead of this University educated mercenary? Were his graphics any better? They certainly wouldn't have been more realistic.
People who are 'taught' creative arts tend to come off the production line like the chap above. The ones you have to watch are the ones who dropped out and did their own thing from early on. Being part of a system corrupts personal creativity as all you are being taught is how to perform within an existing world.
Generally speaking, in order to achieve things (in the UK at least) it mostly depends on four things; where you were born, who you were born to, where you went to school and the size of your cock. In my case, Stepney, working class Irish immigrants, a concrete secondary modern and just shy of 7". So I never stood a chance.
Only mostly though, because a truly creative person would hopefully resist the push from the educational system to tramline them into conformity.
For my own creativity, such as it is, I believe I was lucky in that I had supportive parents who encouraged my imagination and questioning of the status quo, and I quickly built up a group of quirky friends where being contrarian was considered good form. That's a difficult balancing act for children though, because it can easily slip into aggressive opposition to authority and become very negative. Fortunately I avoided that.
If you have contact with children, you should encourage them to use their imagination and question things as much as possible. Even encourage them to question the beliefs that you would like them to have. They may point out underlying prejudices that have lead you to your beliefs or they may take those beliefs on board with a fuller understanding of why they believe them.
Creativity can't necessarily be taught, but I believe everybody has some to start with and it can be nurtured or stifled (or at least damaged/reduced).
I often come across web designers who code - you can either do one or the other well, or both badly.
I went to school with a guy that was excellent at drawing. He could copy a photo and make it look like a photo. That is a huge talent. However, he couldn't create anything original because that part was just missing.
Creative kids can struggle at school because their mind is all over the place, and schooling doesn't do much to nurture that, so yeah - it's educated out of you, or you are constantly in trouble!
We are lucky in Nottingham that we have Confetti college which is a creative college and produces some excellent talent. I've worked with some of the students and can't fault any of them. However, you still need minimum GCSE grades to get in!
if only more people had this attitude!
If something is new to a spectator then.... it's creative.
That shouldn't matter. Just make the music you'd want to listen to, music that means something to you. If other people like it or can relate to it, then that's a bonus. Just my opinion, of course...
Yeah, it's an amazing talent when people can draw or paint super realistically. I'm rather envious actually cause I can't draw for toffee. On the other hand it is also essentially worthless in the 21st century. I bet they wish they lived a couple of hundred years ago :)
Wow you are a short chap !
I did struggle at school In English I wanted to write weird stories of my own, not write about how sh*t of a book I thought Kes was.
In IT I wanted to send rude messages to the teacher over the network instead of write a bloody letter, that's not IT it's typing! Oh and the teacher was not amused when he read the message I sent him anyway, but he was pleased that I could actually send the message as he hadn't shown any of the braindeads in the class how to do anything like that.
In music I wanted to learn how to play guitar not write some crap song with the rest of the class, on a cheap Yamaha synth about saving the bloody environment, but no, apparently I was not the right type of student to learn guitar, whatever the f**k that means.....So who is? One of those poncey lank haired tossers who wore a trench coat for the entire time they went to school and probably still do.
That's just a few examples of how fun school was for me, and yes my mind was always wandering off to places it probably shouldn't have been....or should it?
....Oh and I'm not nuts either I'm as sane as they come, I've never had dysmorphic tendencies when I've had a paintbrush in my hand. Although I do often think about biting the tips of my fingers off sometimes, or snapping my own teeth out. But like I said not crazy in the slightest, infact I'm the sanest person I know :D
Also, what is good design / art ?? It's all down to personal opinion and taste
E.G I think stuff by salvador dahli is sh** that I wouldn't hang in the toilet yet other people love it and spend millions to aquire it.
a) you need to define creativity (not an easy thing).
b) you then need to find evidence that it can, or cannot be taught (which is not an easy thing either).
What behaviour is innate and what is environmental (ie taught) has been a discussion since they year dot.
I'm of the mind that creativity can be taught - to a degree - just as language or mathematics can be taught (which are just other types of creativity). The limits of a person's natural ability - how creative they are in the arts, or in the humanities, or in mathematics may well have a ceiling, but that ceiling can certainly be raised with education; in fact it is the essence of education.
More or less sums up how I view it.
I teach programming. You can learn the rules of assignment, looping, branching, conditional logic, recursion, functions, and object orientation and apply it quite well using almost no creativity at all. I.e. build what your customer wants A, B, C and D just like that, that is providing the client knows what they want, if they do not some creativity is required. To solve innovative solutions to problems creativity is needed. You can always spot the uncreative students, after exams they say 'but Sir we never covered that in class'. I could spend a long time trying to teach creativitty, but I'd be chasing rainbows becauwse it requires more time than is available in class. The only way to really gain this skill is to appy your knowlege new and unique problems and practice this skill often, a teacher play's their part but its up to the student to run with it. Commonly many students just expect to turn up to class so you can hand them 'the knowlege of programming', which I beleive is a flawed approach to learning and teaching.
Creativity is relevant to ones background knowlege on a subject, roughly log(n). The more you know the more you are able to creatively express and the deeper that expression is. That said, just as in art, you can make a pleasing composition with just a few simple elements e.g. Picaso , Modrian , Status Quo, Brian Eno or Acid House but this is an effect of creativity more than it is knowlege.
So in summary you cant teach creativity, just like to cant teach intelllegence. Furthermore, creativity is a form of intelegence. So, either or have or or you don't, or it's or in some cases it's laying dormant
that's not even wrong.
Intelligence (and its expression in creativity, or any other human activity for that matter) is expressed on a scale, or a spectrum.
It certainly NOT a binary characteristic.
No
What you think is good art is down to personal opinion.
However, the value and consideration of what constitutes good art, is a collective, societal, cultural and historic judgement. Good art exists outside of one person's opinion and is considered good by a depth and breadth of critical acclaim, which grows with the weight of years.
this piece is prob my favourite. sorry for the big image.
just a fascinating image really, imo. I don't look too deep into it or do the whole 'art critique' nonsense
Now they may not have a flair for being creative in a specific field but that's more to do with the choice of medium rather than anything else. I've yet to meet anyone who isn't a least a little creative, even if they themselves don't consider it as such.
well yeah obviously man, I mean ,like, duh. :-D
Now your just nitpicking. I meant you either have creativity or yout don't. I plainly said Creativity of a form of intellegence, by that you should be able to deduce I mean one of it's several forms. I could rephrase to say overall you either have a lot or a little iintellegence, but the basic point I make remains the same.
So, if we are going to split hairs it is not a scale or spectrum it is several.
looks like a load of balls to me...
;)
During the (short) history of cognitive psychology, "creative" thought has been more than once defined and re-defined, as well as the notion of "intelligence". Starting from Max Wertheimer's distinction between "mechanical" and "productive" thought, followed by Joy P. Guilford's theory of "convergent and divergent" production, there is a wide consensus among researchers that creativity is an attitude that can be stimulated with an appropriate training. By teaching pupils how to confront different ideas and trying to reach conclusions themselves - something akin to the Socratic method -, they can learn to develop their cognitive skills in a personal way and find new ways to practice what they learned.
Of course "creativity" here is to be understood in its broader meaning of a problem-solving activity, based upon the reorganization, in a personal and effective way, of the elements at the subject's disposal (pretty much the way Gestalt psychology and, subsequently, cognitivism defined it: see for instance Wolfgang K?hler's notion of "insight"), rather than the idea that a lonely genius can come out all of a sudden with some never-seen-before work of art, or something like that.
The notion of "creativity" in art is highly subjective and cannot be expressed in an objective way as cognitive psychology tried and tries to do, also because every kind of art, in the history of mankind, has been building itself at least partially upon something that existed before - without even taking into account that the very concepts of "what is art, and how does it differentiate itself from what is not art" has been debated to this day, and still is.
Howard Gardner's "multiple intelligencies" theory tried to build a whole definition of intelligence including spatial, visual and musical abilities, so that, in the long run, creativity could also be defined as the ability to develop such forms of intelligence. The problem is that Gardner's theory relies on a definition of intelligence which is far too vague and not enough backed by experimental research to be fully deemed objective.
Intelligence, on the other hand, cannot always be defined on a "scale" or "spectrum". If that has been done - in several different ways - since Binet's times as long as logical thought is concerned, the same cannot be done for, say, emotional intelligence. Although the very notion of it has been disputed, EI cannot be "measured" the same way logical intelligence is, despite Daniel Goleman and other researchers' attempts to find a proper and objective way to do it. The most common criticism is that EI measurements are in fact descriptions of individual personalities.
Yep, and to illustrate yor point a lot of people thought Timmy Mallets seminal single 'Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot bikini' was great and it went to number 1 in the charts. But it was sh** then and still is. Of course that's my opinion and you can probably round up a group of 'critics' who will disagree and call it a masterpiece of musical composition.
But that's just personal taste. :)
I'm also a huge fan of his stuff. "Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory" (or something like that) is my personal favourite. :smile: