Sense and Sensation

Assessing creative work has been a bugaboo for a good long time.  In schools it's the constant refrain: “How can you grade creative writing?”  or “It’s a poem: however it comes out is right.”  In businesses and elsewhere, people demand innovation--and are stymied with understanding how to measure it. But this is not the bugaboo we think it is--in the classroom, or in the broader world of creative work.  Here are four different ways to assess creativity, each designed for different settings: 1. Measuring How Creative a Person Is - The Guilford Model 2. Measuring How Creative a Work Is - The Taxonomy of Creative Design 3. Measuring Creative Work Against a Program - The Requirements Model 4. Measuring the Social Value of Creative Work - Csikszentmihalyi’s Model Notably, in each of these cases, what we mean by "creative" changes a little.  Sometimes "creativity" refers to divergent production (how much one produces, or how varied it is).  Sometimes "c...

Creativity happens in places that are defined by the nature of perception. Fundamentally, objects and behaviors exist in the world, we perceive them through our senses, and we hold representations of them in our minds. This opens up three conceptual spaces for creativity: the material space, which is the object or behavior itself; our mode of perception, which is the sense or senses through which we perceive the work, the moderator between the world and our thoughts; and the mind, which is the intellectual framework within which we understand the work. Creative work, then, can be done materially, which means creating or altering physical material or behavior (and this is what we typically think of when we think of creativity); it can be done modally, which means translating a work through different modes of perception; and it can be done mentally, by reframing the way we understand a pre-existing work. Material Creativity Material   creativity ...

Strategies to improve creativity are many, but they are also diffuse.  Little ties them together in a way that offers a coherent vision for how creativity can be understood or developed incrementally.  The Taxonomy of Creative Design, a work in progress, offers a new theory for doing so. Since creative work can be measured along spectrums of both and form and content, the Taxonomy of Creative Design offers a progression from imitation to original creation measured in terms of form and content.  In doing so, it organizes creative works into an inclusive, unifying landscape that serves not only as an analytical lens through which one might evaluate creative work, but also as a methodical approach to developing creative skills. Here is a closer look: Imitation Imitation is the replication of a previous work.  It is the painter with an easel at the museum, painting her own Mona Lisa; it is the jazz musician performing the solo of the great...

Seth Priebatsch, who dropped out of Princeton University to found a website called SCVNGR, aims to build “the game layer on top of the world.”  His goal is to take the lessons learned from the game design industry (which grew larger than Hollywood in 2004) and apply them to other elements of the world.  One target he has set his sights on is education. Game mechanics, he argues, can revolutionize the way schools work. In his keynote address at SXSW Interactive 2011, Priebatsch began by describing schools as “the perfect game ecosystem.”  Schools involve players, challenges, rewards, rules, levels, appointment dynamics, countdowns, incentives, disincentives, and more.  But, he argues, schools are crippled by a number of structural hazards.  One of his examples is the role of grades.  Grades, in gameplay, are like levels, and cum laude, percentile rankings, and the honor roll are statuses or badges that students can earn based on their levels.   ...

Many educators are familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.  It arranges cognitive work on a scale from low-order to high-order thinking, and it's a boon for teachers.  It outlines a series of incremental goals, and we aim to move our students upwards from simple knowledge retrieval to complex synthesis and evaluation. Bloom's Taxonomy has been revised over the years, however.  And these revisions reflect new understanding and educational trends. Anderson & Krathwohl  Anderson and Krathwohl offered a variation in 2001, changing nouns for verbs, cutting “synthesis,” and replacing it with “create".  Here was an early sign that education was shifting towards the understanding that using  what we learn is as important as simply recalling or manipulating what we learn. Marzano & Kendall Five years later, Marzano and Kendall compressed Bloom further and added several metacognitive levels to the taxonomy, acknowledging (or argu...

Divergent thinking has been hot recently.  But it's part of a bigger picture.  Here's a brief explanation of the difference between divergent and convergent thinking--and a model for how they best work together. With convergent thinking, we begin with pieces of information, and we converge around a solution.  Information might be a question, a problem, pieces of evidence, or data.  Most math problems require convergent thinking; they offer pieces of information, and you arrive at a single conclusion. Divergent thinking works in the opposite direction: With divergent thinking, we begin with a prompt, and we generate many solutions.  Examples of prompts that stimulate divergent thinking include: How many uses can you find for a paperclip?  Tell me a story about a rabbit.  What might be challenging about being the president? Notably, divergent thinking can be taught, practiced and improved.  I'll post more about this in the future. ...

I've seen some people get really worked up about this.  (I guess we should admire the desire for clarity!)  Still, it seems an important distinction.  We might know what creativity is, but what's innovation?  How are they different? Let's start with innovation: Definitions abound.  Here are just a few, gathered from talks, from the web, from dictionaries. Innovation is... ...what happens when creativity has a bottom line ...the conversion of knowledge or ideas into a benefit ...invention + exploitation ...the process that transforms ideas into commercial value ...people creating value by implementing new ideas ...a new method, idea, or product ...a new product, process or service that is discontinuous from prior practice and yields new avenues for solving problems and fulfilling an organization's mission ...a change that produces more-than-marginally better results These seem disparate, but they share common elements: ...what happens...

It's increasingly understood that creativity is an essential skill in the 21st century.  But for those environments in which creativity is still seen as childish retreat, it helps to have a good, short argument in the back pocket.  Here's one--one that ties creativity together with critical thinking: Critical Thinking and Creativity Part of what motivates many educators is the understanding that the world our students are entering is more complex and more demanding of our attention than it ever has been.   Our civic responsibilities, for example, remind us of the necessity of sound critical thinking skills for a functioning society.  At elections, we make decisions about complex issues like tax policy, international relations, campaign finance reform, and much, much more.  In courts, we measure and evaluate the intricacies of DNA evidence, financial systems, and statistical analyses.  Navigating these turbulent waters of civic life today challenges ...

To friends and attendees at the 2012 SXSWedu and NAIS conferences, As a follow up to the outpouring of support following these two recent presentations, I've begun this blog as an accessible place to collect and share work in the areas of creativity, education, philosophy, and cognitive psychology.   Here, I aim to expand upon and share ideas from the talk in posts that include both slides and a written explanation.  So far, you can find the core ideas--the Taxonomy of Creative Design and the Three Regions for Creativity --and several additional posts.  In coming weeks and months I'll explore other examples and ideas from the presentation (guidelines for good creative work, examples from the presentation, and more), and other work around the intersection of creativity, education, philosophy, and cognitive psychology. If you have interest in particular ideas from the presentation, or if you have specific questions, please let me know in a comment below or in ...