Designer’s and user’s creativity - processes, goals, limits
Designer’s and user’s creativity processes, goals, limits An Interview with Virginia Hechtel How exactly does creativity occur? Where does this phantom creature often covered by an allure of mysticism come from, and what exotic conditions will help it thrive in captivity? We will try to outline the situation and to give a framework to this widely discussed topic on which many people already have exposed their positions, interviewing and posing some key questions to the Italian-German designer Virginia Hechtel attending a two years master’s program in Product Service System Design at Politecnico di Milano. If you had to give a working definition of creativity, how would you define it? To start this conversation I’d like first of all to introduce a statement made by Bruno Munari in 1992 which is “When somebody says: I could do this as well , it means that he can redo it, otherwise he would have already done it”. Actually I really think that creativity is not just a characteristic or a property but a real state of mind, an attitude, a way of living. In the book ‘Fantasia’, 1977, Munari gives a very technical definition of creativity. He says that“creativity is a finalised use of fantasy, or rather of fantasy and invention, in a global way. Creativity applied in the field of design, considering design as a way to plan and to project, is a practise that, even being free as the fantasy and precise as the invention, includes all the aspects of a problem, not only imagination as fantasy and function as invention do, but also the psychological, social, economic and human aspect.” Munari here strongly differentiates between creativity, fantasy and invention, also if in my opinion these three terms are very tied to each other. An other definition provided by Robert Sternberg tells that creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel and appropriate. So to answer I think that on one hand creativity is not just a definition to be referred to the field of design and to be compared to fantasy and invention as Munari explains, but on the other hand it is also not just something new and able to work for what it is thought for as Sternberg states. Referring to Heather Hesketh, founder of hesket.com in 1995, I prefer to say that creativity is the ability of making something.
from nothing. It is really looking at old things and seeing new ways of using them or rediscovering the old ways. Creativity then is also an aptitude towards oneself and the others, it is self-reliance and knowing when to rely on others. And for sure creativity is not just limited to a single field. Creativity can be found wherever there is thought. It may be in words, pictures, code, actions, or even in a glance. And what about creativity and innovation, what’s the difference? Well nowadays almost everybody is speaking about innovation, every company is working on and producing innovative products, all the world is trying or just pretend to be innovative, while nobody is ever pointing out to be creative. Have you ever read about a creative company in any report or press release? Would you trust in a brand which philosophy relies in being creative? In my opinion these two terms are of course different, but they really go hand in hand. So it might be useful to explicitly distinguish between creativity and innovation in order to better understand where the real and determinant difference lays. Usually creativity is used to refer to the act of producing new ideas, approaches or actions, while innovation is the process of both generating and applying such creative ideas in some specific context.
For example returning to the context of a company or an organization the term innovation is often used to refer to the entire process by which the company or the organization generates creative new concepts and converts them into novel, useful and viable commercial products, services, and business practices, while the term creativity is reserved to apply specifically to the generation of novel proposals by individuals or groups, as a necessary step within the innovation process. HBC professor Teresa Amabile suggests that “ while innovation begins with creative ideas, […] creativity by individuals and teams is a starting point for innovation. The first is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the second." As I said before these two words really go hand in hand. In order to be innovative, employees have to be creative to stay competitive. Innovation is where the creative concept becomes a business practice. It starts with a plan, a thorough analysis of the steps necessary for implementation, with business and design metrics applied. It can take months or years of hard work to put this creative concept into action. But that is what innovation is really about. Not showing off about all the wonderful proposals you can come up with. It is not even enough to show that a proposal in particular is definitely a creative one. To be truly innovative is to be able to apply your creative solutions to problems at the organizational level. Innovation is a system-wide application and implementation of a creative concept, which has been strengthened and developed and tested to be sure that it is at its best level possible for this point in time. And so how can creativity be really useful in activities close to yours? where and how can it be most successfully applied? In processes, products, communication, services…? As I see creativity as a state of mind, as an attitude, I really think that creativity can be applied to every single field which is concerned into life. I could just say that from my point of view I would be less creative in thinking and designing a process, but just because it is not exactly my specific and favourite working field. For sure I might say that there are fields like products and communication where creativity is most visible and tangible. But for example looking at services there are many cases were a creative thought has been successfully and visibly applied, just looking at some big projects like Itunes or NikeID but also at less important,or better less known, services like the possibility of customising the well-known M&M’s candies. I think that creativity actually can successfully be
applied in every situation where the outcome improves the original project, as I don’t perceive creativity for itself very relevant in activities close to mine. From this point of view I like when Edward de Bono says that “creativity is more than just being different. The creative idea is not just different, for the sake of being different. Creative ideas must necessarily have or add value.” A different thing might be referring to the kind of creativity where at the base there is no purpose or goal to be achieved. In this case we enter more in the field of art, of self expression and works rising out for personal needs and motivations. This doesn’t mean that we talk about a different level of creativity, but just about a different field which is not close to mine and which I don’t think to have too many credits to discuss about in detail. You mentioned the term ‘level of creativity’. But can we give a level to creativity? Is problem solving for example creativity? You are right I mentioned ‘level of creativity’ but actually I would not really speak about a certain level of creativity like discussing if problem solving is creative or not , which by the way for sure includes a high amount of creativity, or if a design process is more or less creative than writing a romance, composing a song or painting a piece of art. I would rather say that I think that in the same field we can definitely speak about different degrees of creativity. Not merely as something to evaluate higher or lower from a qualitative point of view, but more as a matter of what is required, the motivation and the purpose which stay behind what has been created. Because I think that the way you can tell how creative a person, a thought, an object or whatever is, requires to look at the results, at the output of this creativity as well. Just having a lot of ideas doesn’t make a person creative. The ideas have to be new, original, unexpected, useful, appropriate and last but not least attractive. The level of creativity stands in the amount of spark of newness in it, in the fact that the outcome works or does what it is supposed to do, and that it can attract others, to help you implement it, or to attract buyers if the idea is for a product. Focusing on creativity, is creativity common to all people or is it a unique characteristic of a selected few? In his studies Freud stated that creativity is not a conscious process, that it appears to be present in individuals who have suffered and that there is a correlation between creativity and genius. Do you think that creative persons really have to be ‘psychotic’ people to be creative and that creativity is a characteristic of genius only?
Or you better believe like Behavioural studies affirm that social factors and the environment are the elements which have the most powerful impact on creativity and that there is no genetic difference at birth? Pablo Picasso once said “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Although if he referred to art and not to creativity in specific I think that this statement could well define my position to this question. Some time ago the late author and radio personality Earl Nightingale, known as the ‘Dean of Personal Development‘, assembled a descriptive sketch of the creative person. What is particularly significant in his description is that to him the average creative person tends not to be the wild dressing, far-out stereotype, but is in fact a lot like a very ordinary person. He states that what sets the truly creative person apart is not a gifted birth or a special inborn talent; it is more a matter of mindset, attitude and habit. So Earl Nightingale says that with the proper discipline, these qualities can be developed by virtually anyone. And actually I have always thought that all people have the potential to be creative at a certain degree, anyway I must admit that I think that there should be at least a raw seed of creativity at the base, which than can be watered to let the creativity blossom in time like a tree. So I actually think that there should be something very particular, but I also think that this kind of little and uncovered seed is something insight many persons and not a unique characteristic for few selected favourites. Anyway it is important to notice that creativity is closely bound to memory. That is why creativity declines along with memory. In the creative process the brain takes inventory of everything it knows about a subject, then strings together different, sometimes even surprising elements of that knowledge in a novel, inventive way. This requires an ability to recall memories as well as being able to focus intently on them. Long away from the idea of creativity as a characteristic for genius only, the ability of recalling memories and of associating ideas which have any link between them are different ways of being creative. Moreover in the book ‘The Right Brain‘ Thomas R. Blakeslee explains that "the ability to recognize things in an altered form or context is the basis of creative thinking. Creative breakthroughs generally are a result of finding hidden relationships and patterns that are obscured by their context." That could be the reason why nearly every new idea is a synthesis of other ideas and not just a product developed by a genius mind. So a great way to
generate ideas is to force combinational possibilities. The more bizarre the combination the more original the ideas that come out, but also little combinations can bring to relevant results. Just to remember some creative outcomes which better analysed are no more than fresh intuitions, born by the capacity to see at things with different eyes. Someone put a trolley and a suitcase together and got a suitcase with wheels, someone put an igloo with a hotel and got an ice palace, someone put a copier and a telephone together and got a fax machine, someone put a bell and a clock together and got an alarm clock, someone put a coin punch and a wine press together and we got books. Fine and so those who have a more developed ‘raw seed’ do they have specific traits? Which kind of personality do you think should they have? As I have already mentioned Earl Nightingale has assembled a descriptive sketch of a creative person. Extracting his statements and combining them with my personal point of view this is a possible portrait which could identify a highly creative person. From an external point of view a creative person does not have to have a particular aspect, as already said several times what determinates a creative person is in my opinion an attitude to himself and to the external world. I think that the main keywords to creativity are courage and curiosity. As Erich Fromm stated “creativity requires the courage to let certainties go. Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled, to concentrate, to accept conflict and tension, to be born everyday, to feel a sense of self.” Being creative is mainly to have the courage and the curiosity that bring you to push yourself to places that you have never been before, to test your limits, to break barriers and established rules, to do new, unusual and absurd combinations, but most of all the courage to do mistakes. As Edward de Bono once said “it is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.” A creative person can sometimes be afraid of doing something wrong, but he has the courage to fail, because often the mistake is the real starting point which catalyses the creativity process. The creative person is a curious person who sees his mind as an inexhaustible storehouse, but he must constantly augment its storehouse of ideas, thoughts and wisdom with new material from which to forge new ideas and connections. The creative person is intensely observant, he pays careful attention to everything he thinks and hears, he is able to see things from different points of view and he often focuses more on details rather than on
the entire object. He is passionate and committed to everything he does and he does not trust only its intuitions but also the ones of others as he respects the minds of others, and gives credit to others. In fact imaginatively on a daily basis he thinks mainly about three things: himself, his worth and his fellow man. Further this kind of person has a carefully and clearly defined set of goals to achieve, but as he is never really satisfied he is always looking forward to set new personal goals and he is always looking for better ways to do his work and live his life. And obviously it is not to forget that this attitude finishes to affect also those around him, in a very positive way, representing a plus-factor for all who know him. These persons care much about problems, but in a positive way as they see them as challenges, because without problems there would be little reason to think at all. For a creative person to merely worry about problems it‘s a waste of time, so he wisely invests the same time and energy in solving problems. Further the creative person is not just open-minded but he is also opened to give himself and his ideas away. He is a giver as well as a go-getter. Finally questions and spare time are two of their most important values. Always making questions trying to understand and to give new answers is a frequent trait of creative persons, while spare time is seen as an incredible resource as many of the world's greatest ideas were conceived exactly in the creator's spare time. Despite of these particular traits and personality do you think that a creative person should have some particular intellectual abilities as well? And if so which ones? As I already spent quite a lot words trying to draw a creative person I would just answer with a statement by John D. MacArthur who liked to speak about ‘Creative Intelligence’. Precisely he said that intelligence derives from the Latin word “legere” which means to gather, collect, assemble, choose, form an impression, deduce, hence to understand, to know, to perceive. While create derives from the Latin word “creare” which means to produce, cause to grow, hence to come into existence. So an intelligent person knows how to select and choose, what to leave out and what to keep. A creative person knows what to combine. And so to answer to your question I think that the main intellectual ability required to be a creative person is the one of being creatively intelligent.
Well and further despite of certain traits and personality and this very particular intellectual ability, is it in your opinion possible to enhance creativity and how? And do you think that creativity could come or be trigged by users? To answer to this question I will again use a quotation by Edward de Bono who states that “creativity is a skill, not just a matter of individual talent therefore it can be learned.” In addition I found very interesting a comparison that he made during an interview about the possibility to train creativity as it was a muscle. He compared creativity to an ordinary school subject or a variety of sport activity saying that we can train creativity like we can train mathematics or learning French, and like any other skill and of course some people will be better than other, like in tennis or skiing or cooking. So like in any activity there are persons who are more gifted and others who are less, but anyway it is possible to enhance creativity. Not just the presence and the widely use but most of all the proven effectiveness of all the various techniques used to better understand and reformulate a problem and to trigger creativity (like cognitive maps, Umberto Eco’s ideal reader, latent structures, collages, Chinese portraits, creative cards and Alex Faickney Osborn’s brainstorming) give evidence that creativity cannot only just be trained but is being actually enhanced in many, we could even say every, fields. Than speaking about the possibility of creativity coming from the users, I would say that a clear evidence is proven by the more and more high number of bottom-up creativity cases in which the final user rather than the company is the one introducing innovation. We can find an interesting contribution to this topic in the book ‘Democratizing Innovation’. In this book the author Eric Von Hippel explains how a growing body of empirical evidence work shows that in most cases the users themselves are those who first develop most new industrial and consumer products and services and how for this aspect they are a valuable resource for research and development. And in fact users are increasingly consulted by corporations and integrated in the processes of design. Above all it is interesting to notice that these innovating users often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. So actually it we could state that it is possible to enhance creativity. In addition it is interesting to see that the action of personalising and transforming objects to personal needs is an ‘always existed’ and natural attitude of people. Many times products innovated by final users, finally often result better and more successful
than those designed trying to answer to people’s need after a deep market analysis, because asking people what they desire and/or deserve does not give a right answer to the design, because usually what we really need is something that we do not really know, but something that we are used to do by ourselves by instinct. So I think that a balanced introduction of users bottom-up creativity supported by a continuous training could really improve not just the market itself, but especially the value of people’s everyday life due to the introduction on the market of new products and services born from people’s real needs. And if it is possible to enhance creativity what kind of motivation or conditions drive or can drive creativity and lead somebody to action? In this case there are many intrinsic and extrinsic motivation which can play a role as Teresa Amabile distinguishes. So to reply I will just use Amabile’s words as she once said that “the desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it’s in the arts, sciences, or business.” I found an other meaningful contribution in ‘Fire in the Crucible’ a book about creative genius by John Briggs, where the authors tells that “creators create in order to find some truth about life, and we value them precisely because we see that they have found it and have bequeathed to us their mind-altering vision.” In this vision inventors or generally speaking creators are nothing else from just being a bit more rational creative thinker. Albert Einstein said he desired simply to “experience the universe as a single significant whole.” From childhood, Charles Darwin said that he had the “strongest desire to understand and to comprehend whatever I observed.” Mozart’s compositions would grow on him until “the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once.” So I could say that one of the central driving forces of creative activity is this urge for wholeness, an attempt to see the big picture and reconcile the personal with the universal. This urge to fit all life’s nuances into one big puzzle is a hallmark of creativity and not just a trait of few highlighted personages. In addiction it is important to remember the issue of the ‘mistake by chance’ as some of the most celebrated discoveries and inventions have sprung from serendipity.
Fleming invented penicillin when he discovered that the mould that had contaminated a preparation for the microscopic analyse had also killed all the bacteria. The process of immunisation was discovered by Pasteur when he injected a too weak dose of cholera bacteria into chickens. 3M’s Post-it-Notes were accidentally developed by Silver, a scientist at 3M, as ‘low-tack’, reusable pressure sensitive adhesive which later Fry, who had attended one of Silver's seminars, came up with the idea of using to anchor his bookmark in his hymnbook. Obviously we tend to look at this ‘mistake by chance’ without really knowing the whole story behind. For sure there have to be a strong motivation which brings you to work on a subject and serendipity usually is just a matter of condition, as contiguity and mediation are, able to facilitate the process of creativity rather than a real motivation that leads somebody to action. Also because if the people behind these well-know stories were not working at something slightly different from their successful invention they would even not have recognised their excellent discovery. So if creativity is a skill and it can be trained, supposing that there are the right motivations, do you think that it is as the Gestalt approach says just a process that can be learned by heart through rules and procedures? Well it’s true that in my opinion creativity can be trained and enhanced, but definitely it is not just a matter of learning by heart through mere rules and procedures. It is more about a combination of training and environment as well. To better explain my point of view I will refer to the book ‘Jamming: the Art of Discipline of Corporate Creativity‘ written by John Kao. In ‘Jamming‘ he actually begins by showing how creativity, like the musical discipline of jazz, has a vocabulary and a grammar. Near to the Gestalt approach he sees creativity as a process, and because of that it can be observed, analyzed, understood, replicated, taught and managed. But he also explains how creativity needs a particular environment in which to blossom and grow. Like musicians in a jam session, a group of businesspeople can take an idea, challenge one another’s imagination and produce an entirely new set of possibilities. In this book Kao reveals how managers can stimulate creativity in their employees, explores the impact of information technology on creativity, looks at the globalization of creativity and shows how to ensure the loyalty of people who design, build and deliver today’s vital products and services.
We have mentioned different theories on creativity of arised in the last 100 years, but why do you think that creativity has played such a marginal role until not long ago? To this question It is interesting to see that until the renaissance, people running schools and universities, thinking, were church people. So they did not need perceptual thinking, design thinking or creative thinking, what they needed was just truth, logic and argument to prove heretics’ wrong, and that has become the core of the later thinking. For a very long period of time we have had a good thinking to find the truth but we have never developed the thinking for creating value. Initially moreover creativity has encountered many obstacles first of all due to this tradition of focusing on ‘logic’ issues and giving to creativity an allure of mysticism and spirituality. While first only few people were interested in studding creativity, when it came to start observing and understanding this phenomenon a strong paradigmatic and commercial approach has been applied to the study of creativity. People tried to give answers using inappropriate tools coming from scientific backgrounds and making it difficult to define specific criteria able to asses creativity. Hundred years of creativity research starting from Freud, to Behavioural studies, to the Gestalt approach and arriving to cognitive psychology have shown very different methodologies and results difficult to be integrated in a general theory as creativity in my opinion still remains beyond ‘proved’ statements bound to subjective and personal positions and views. I personally think that creativity has played such a marginal role until not long ago, because the market laws and rules tended to focus mainly on marketing and selling, putting the creation process besides as something secondary. When companies started to think how to improve their activities and to ‘innovate’ the numbers of studies on creativity increased as well. After having tried to treat and study creativity as a science, now we know that there are some techniques to measure creativity and all of them require the measurement of four different but almost always constant components which are fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration of the ideas. Anyway I still believe that there is not a real and unique way to asses creativity or better that there is a way to measure it, but as I believe that creativity can be trained, it is just about assessing creativity in a certain period of time tied to the moment when the measurement is done and not something fixed which cannot absolutely change and written black on white.
If in a way we all are creative at a certain degree why can’t we always think creatively? Which kind of blocks do you think affect creativity the most? Well it is interesting that people like to call creativity as ‘thinking outside of the box’ which I think is not the right way to look at it, because it is important to realize that there is actually no ‘box’ to step outside of. People tend to create their own imaginary boxes simply by living life and accepting certain things so to be perceived as ‘normal’. But this may be good for society overall, but it is that sort of unquestioning consensus that inhibits the natural creative abilities. So talking about creative persons conscious about their ability, rather than looking for ways to inspire creativity, they should just realize the truth that is that they are already capable of creative thinking at all times. Of course it is also true that there are some rational or emotional blocks and barriers that may affect creativity. So to answer to this question I like to refer to a list of ten common ways we usually tend to suppress our natural creative abilities which comes from Roger von Oech’s book ‘A Whack on the Side of the Head‘. Some points are strong related to the traits already identified trying to draw a sketch of a creative person, anyway this list can help to better understand that the barriers to a good idea often are truly all just in our head. 1. First of all one of the worst aspects of formal education is the focus on the correct answer to a particular question or problem, because often there is more than one correct answer, and the second one you come up with might be better than the first. 2. While critical thinking skills based on logic are one of our main strengths in evaluating the feasibility of a creative idea, it is often the enemy of truly innovative thoughts. One of the best ways to escape the constraints of logical mind is to think metaphorically, because usually we accept metaphors as true without thinking about it. Realising that ‘truth’ is often just symbolic, it is easier to feel free to come up with alternatives. 3. Usually although being creative it is in us since we where children the habit of following rules that others have set without ever asking either ‘why’ or ‘why not’ even in the face of evidence that the rule does not work. Obviously it is better said than done, but to be creative as I just previously said we need to have the courage to start breaking some fixed rules. 4. Of course being practical is hugely important when it comes to execution, but often it might bring to affect creativity even before it can properly blossom. A good training could so be to play the ‘what if’ game as often as possible, simply allowing the imagination
to go where it wants, which might bring to discover a crazy idea that is so insanely practical that no one’s thought of it before, but it could be an excellent start point to be developed than in a practical way. 5. One of the biggest mistakes people tend to do is to disassociate play from work. Often we hear the expression ‘work hard and play hard’, but actually they are and should always be the same thing to a creative thinker. 6. In an era of hyper-specialization, those who happily explore completely unrelated areas of life and knowledge are able to recognise that everything is in fact related. As Carl Ally said about creative persons ‘they want to be know-it-alls‘. A creative person is finally more an explorer rather than a highlyspecialized cog in the machine. 7. There is nothing wrong with being a ‘serious’ person which keeps us civilized boils down to conformity, consistency, shared values, and thinking about things the same way everyone else does, because groupthink helps a society to function. But if you are able to understand this you can then give yourself permission to turn everything that is accepted upside down and shake out the illusions, to be a ‘fool‘ can allow you to see things for what they really are. 8. Although if we rationally realize that most every situation is ambiguous to some degree, often trying to dive complex situations into black and white boxes can lead to disaster, and yet we still tend to do it. It is an innate characteristic of human psychology to desire certainty, but the creative thinker has not just the tendency but more the necessity if not the obligation to reject the false comfort of clarity when it is not really appropriate, and this not just as a sort of rebellion against others, but as a real an true evidence of intelligence. 9. Although if creative people should have the courage to fail, we usually hate being wrong, and yet as already said mistakes often teach us the most as Thomas Edison can show us being wrong 1,800 times before getting the light bulb right. But to learn from our mistakes, we have to free ourselves to make mistakes, trying out new ideas and seeing what happens. In fact what’s the worst that can happen if we are wrong? Maybe we just might think of having just lost precious time, but remember that as I mentioned before spare time is one of the most important value of creative people. 10. Having previously said that in my opinion we all are limitlessly creative, denying our own creativity is like denying we are a human being. If you continue to believe and to tell yourself that you are not creative, it becomes true. So It is important to acknowlede of being inherently creative, and then to start to tear down the barriers we have allowed to be created in our mind.
Going back to a more theoretical issue, creativity has been often divided in different phases. Which of these phases do you think is the most challenging? Talking about the phases of creativity, Graham Wallas & Richard Smith in their work ‘Art of Thought‘, published in 1926, presented one of the first models of the creative process. In the Wallas’ stage model, creative insights and illuminations are explained by a process consisting of 5 stages: preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual's mind on the problem and explores the problem's dimensions), incubation (where the problem is internalized into the unconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening), intimation (the creative person gets a 'feeling' that a solution is on its way), illumination or insight (where the creative idea bursts forth from its preconscious processing into conscious awareness) and verification (where the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied). Well I found interesting to discover that in numerous publications, Wallas' model is just treated as four stages, with ‘intimation’ seen as a sub-stage. There has been some empirical research looking at whether, referring to Wallas‘ incubation stage definition, a period of interruption or rest from a problem may aid creativity to problem-solving. Various hypotheses have been advanced to explain why incubation may aid creative problem-solving, and have finally noticed how incubation aids creative problem-solving in that it enables ‘forgetting’ of misleading clues. From this point of view although if many publication tend not to evaluate the ’incubation’ phase as something really relevant, I think that it is exactly this the phase which might be the most important, as its absence may lead a person to become fixated on inappropriate strategies of solving the problem. The only problem is to notice that on the other hand this position disputes the earlier hypothesis that creative solutions to problems can arise mysteriously from the unconscious mind while the conscious mind is occupied on other tasks. But again I think that a period of interruption or rest from a problem and the mysterious arousal of creative solutions while the mind is occupied on other tasks are not opposite and irreconcilable theories, but on the contrary, I believe that often it is exactly when you allow yourself to leave the problem in a corner, thinking about something else that the solution arrives with all its strenght. Further I also found remarkable that in Wallas’ model we do not find a final ‘communication’ phase as if it was actually just a matter of expressing a concept
n a good way with no effects and relation with creativity. To bring an example we could compare a photographer with a painter, the first transforms a promising scene into a photo while the second paints a view seen with his eyes. The tool is more subjective in the second case, so the translation (photo) is less important than a creation (paint). But we know that we cannot always say that this statement is true. There are photos which have an un estimated value much higher than paints. In addition there are highly creative or innovative project which due mainly to bad communication are finally not appreciate or understood. So the ’communication’ phase becomes something not collateral in the creativity, but a real and necessary tool to express the entire process. And to be able to present our creative concept in a proper way we although need to be creative, becasue to present an idea it is like to tell a story, it is important to catch the attention of our interlocutors, to fascinate them, to let them dream, but still remaining reliable. In conclusion thinking about companies and organisations can they stimulate creativity? And if so how could they do it? Given that as I have already frequently stated we all are limitlessly creative, companies and organisation can not only but they have to stimulate creativity if they want not just to survive but to be successful on the market and stay alive. So the real question becomes how they can enhance this process. Well as positive emotions tie to higher creativity and negative feelings link to lower motivation and creativity the best lesson comes again from Teresa Amabile who encourages to “support employees’ progress in their work every day. Set clear and meaningful goals for them; provide direct help, versus hindrance; offer adequate resources and time; respond to successes and failures by drawing on the experience as a learning opportunity, not just a moment to praise or reprimand; and establish a culture where people are treated with respect”.An other relevant concept is the one of ‘reducing goalobsession’ to improve performance which actually is not new. In the early 1900, Robert Yerkes and J. D. Dodson developed the aptly named Yerkes-Dodson Law. Returning to the matter of motivation in this law they premise that performance increases relative to motivation (they call it ‘arousal‘) but only to a point, after which performance drops. Typically, it is drawn as an inverted U-shaped curve. Referring to this law as Steve Shapiro explains if you
lack motivation, you have low performance. Statement which is not really surprising, because as your motivation increases, your performance increases too but only to a certain point. This point is called the sweet spot of optimal performance. Then, as people become more goal obsessed, performance paradoxically decreases. Goals increase stress and fixate you on the future rather than the present. Within the business world, Yerkes and Dodson found that to improve concentration, intellectually challenging tasks required lower levels of arousal/ motivation. The more creative the work, the less motivation required to hit peak levels of performance. Studies also reveal that creativity diminishes when individuals are rewarded (externally motivated) for doing their work. Because the desire to achieve the goal overtakes the personal interest in the endeavor. And so as a result, risk taking reduces and creativity vanishes. To conclude we can say that to stimulate creativity an organisation should first create an environment of performance and motivation. Achieving this is often, paradoxically, the result of less effort rather than harder work. Although goals and performance targets are useful tools, they can also have a detrimental impact on results. When people are future fixated, their creativity and overall performance diminish. So it is important to find the sweet spot of optimal performance to perceive a relevant increase in employee productivity, creativity, and satisfaction and all this achieved with less effort.
Politecnico di Milano Product Service System Design Semiotics Rebecca Pera Virginia Hechtel