What exactly can be described as creative?
Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2025 10:26 am
Although the term creativity is used in everyday life, a precise definition of the term is not trivial. The term has many facets and is open to interpretation. The Cambridge dictionary defines creativity as "the ability to produce original and unusual ideas or to create something new or imaginative."
Creative tasks generally require a certain degree of original thinking, extensive experience and understanding of the environment. A well-known definition comes from a comprehensive literature review by Sarkar and Chakrabarti (2008), in which they analyzed more than 200 of these definitions and finally summarized creativity as follows:
“Creativity occurs through a process through which an agent uses its ability to generate ideas, solutions or products that are new and valuable”.
The general idea is that creativity is the ability of some human lithuania consumer email list individuals to create something that did not exist before. However, closer inspection reveals that in most cases these creations arise from concepts that already existed or could have existed, but that no one has yet explicitly connected into a solid product. This idea of recombining existing concepts gave rise to art such as Dalí's "The Persistence of Memory". Clocks had been painted before, and everyone knew the concept of melting, but no one had previously connected these concepts together in the way that Dali did. There have been many different factors used as indicators of creativity throughout history. Sarkar and Chakrabarti (2008) have summarized these into two main categories: novelty (unusualness, unexpectedness, surprise) and value (usefulness, quality, significance). Novelty is usually cited as the defining property of a creative artifact, but value is equally necessary and important. It is easy to think of something that has never been designed before as a car with fifteen wheels. While such a car would be novel, i.e. would have a high degree of novelty, this creative artifact lacks value.
Creative tasks generally require a certain degree of original thinking, extensive experience and understanding of the environment. A well-known definition comes from a comprehensive literature review by Sarkar and Chakrabarti (2008), in which they analyzed more than 200 of these definitions and finally summarized creativity as follows:
“Creativity occurs through a process through which an agent uses its ability to generate ideas, solutions or products that are new and valuable”.
The general idea is that creativity is the ability of some human lithuania consumer email list individuals to create something that did not exist before. However, closer inspection reveals that in most cases these creations arise from concepts that already existed or could have existed, but that no one has yet explicitly connected into a solid product. This idea of recombining existing concepts gave rise to art such as Dalí's "The Persistence of Memory". Clocks had been painted before, and everyone knew the concept of melting, but no one had previously connected these concepts together in the way that Dali did. There have been many different factors used as indicators of creativity throughout history. Sarkar and Chakrabarti (2008) have summarized these into two main categories: novelty (unusualness, unexpectedness, surprise) and value (usefulness, quality, significance). Novelty is usually cited as the defining property of a creative artifact, but value is equally necessary and important. It is easy to think of something that has never been designed before as a car with fifteen wheels. While such a car would be novel, i.e. would have a high degree of novelty, this creative artifact lacks value.