I was recently looking at the plastic flowers with which someone had decorated their office, and caught myself contemplating how one could design and market plastic flowers that emit artificial flower essence. I told the idea to the person who had bought the plastic flowers and she excitedly assured me that if smell-emiting plastic flowers existed that she would definitely buy them. I was simultaneously delighted and disgusted - delighted that I had come up with a marketable invention (I won't tell you how the flowers keep their smell :-) and disgusted by how crass and commercial it was.
I didn't forge ahead with the idea for smell-emiting plastic flowers, but the experience got me thinking in a new way about the creative process itself. Academic theories of creativity tend to emphasize the development of expertise and often espouse the notion that creativity is domain-specific (i.e. if you're a creative mathematician you're unlikely to be a creative musician or interior decorator). It's a fair question to ask whether the creative process is inherently domain-specific, or whether the apparent domain-specificity of human creativity reflects the fact that almost all of us (including the academics who come up with these theories) are schooled in a particular way. Schools teach us how to develop problem solving expertise in narrow domains. Knowledge is carved up and served to students as separate subjects and this undoubtedly affects cognitive development and in particular the approach we take to creative problem solving. If there is an unsightly weed, we invent a chemical that kills it. If children and animals playing on the grass are negatively affected by the toxic chemical, we put a fence around the grass. It has recently been claimed that creativity is on the decline. In my opinion, it's not that we're not creative enough; one look in any department store should assure anyone that we're extraordinarily, boundlessly creative. The problem is that we tend to deploy our creative thinking skills in a specialized, narrowly focused manner.
This is not the only kind of creative thinking possible. I first caught a glimpse of this when my mother talked to me about her work with First Nations people in the far north of Canada. When a member of the community had a new idea, it was discussed amongst the elders from every possible perspective, and refined to the point where it took all these perspectives into account. They never voted on anything; each idea was discussed until there was unanimous agreement. The process was painstakingly slow. What would take a few hours in southern Canada would take days in the north. But at the end, no one held a grudge, and the idea benefited from the diverse inputs of individuals who had different roles and perspectives on the community and the land.
We see a trend in this direction in the business world; corporations are increasingly engaged in collaborative forms of decision making, problem solving, and innovation. But the same principle applies to individuals. We can consciously decide to ‘consult with' the various points of view we have internalized, and to continue reflecting on an idea from different perspectives until a sense of unity or harmony is achieved. By engaging in this more holistic form of creative thinking we may not only end up with better ideas and products but a less fragmented --- more integrated --- understanding of the world. Instead of asking ‘can we be more creative' should we be asking ‘can deploy our inventive powers in more meaningful, less short-sighted ways'? How can we create with our whole minds --- taking into account not just the impact the idea will have in the domain of life it is obviously related to, but the impact it will have on the world at large? This may be a crucial step toward not just a richer understanding of creativity, but a more sustainable world. The challenge for our generation may be not to come up with creative ideas, nor to find creative solutions to problems, but to find creative ideas and solutions that do not generate other problems, that take the broader context-including its interrelated social, cultural, and ecological components-into account.
As a step in the direction of a more holistic perspective on creativity, I am working on a theory of creativity referred to as honing theory, according to which the creative process transforms the world in ways that reflect the particular worldview of the creator. A worldview is an internal mental model of reality. It is not just a compendium of knowledge, values, and so forth, but a manner of weaving them into an integrated web of understandings; a way of seeing the world and being in the world. While many theories of creativity focus almost exclusively on how the creative process results in the generation of a product, honing theory views as equally important the effect of the creative process on the worldview of the creator.
Honing theory also differs from many theories of creativity (and higher cognition in general) with respect to the assertion that higher cognition is highly domain-specific. Academics sometimes assume that this issue can be resolved by determining to what extent ratings of intelligence or expertise in one domain are correlated with ratings of intelligence or expertise in another. An unspoken assumption here is that measurements of expertise are all that is needed to detect any sort of quality that might characterize or unify an individual's creative or intellectual ventures, and indeed that the outputs of higher cognitive processes are objectively comparable. The reality is that while manifestations of higher cognition are sometimes comparable, even quantitatively, often there is little objective basis for comparison. Higher cognition may be domain general not in the sense that expertise in one enterprise guarantees expertise in another, but in the sense that there are multiple interacting venues for creative exploration and self-expression open to any individual, and through which that individual's worldview may be gleaned. It may be that our potential for cross-domain learning is only just beginning to be exploited, through ventures such as the Learning through the Arts program in Canada, in which students, for example, learn mathematics through dance, or learn about food chains through the creation of visual art. It seems reasonable that if knowledge is presented in compartmentalized chunks, students end up with a compartmentalized understanding of the world, while if knowledge were presented more holistically, a more integrated kind understanding may be possible.
It may be that the continual bombardment of information in modern society interferes with our capacity to create wisely --- to ‘go deep' with the knowledge one already has, consider it from multiple perspectives, over multiple time frames, and hone ideas that actualize one's potential to exert a positive creative impact. Before any particular individual was born, an understanding of the world had never been forged from that individual's perspective. Accordingly, each individual has a unique potential to creatively contribute to the world. However, although everday life abounds with opportunities to acquire new bits of knowledge, this knowledge is often of superficial or fleeting relevance to any given individual's potential creative contribution. It may inspire ideas for things that get used once or twice, or that make someone a few bucks, at the cost of substantial negative environmental impact. The idea of plastic flowers that emit artificial flower essence is creative, but after taking a few steps back, reflecting on it from different angles and considering its potential broader impact, one quickly sees that it's probably not the kind of creative idea the world really needs.
For more information on the honing theory of creativity see: https://people.ok.ubc.ca/lgabora/
