Sense and Sensation

If imitation is the first step towards developing a creative vocabulary, then variation is the first step towards developing one’s own voice. (See the Taxonomy of Creative Design .) So what does this look like in a classroom? A number of years ago, a colleague created an assignment for Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr. Hyde .  The assignment asks students to rewrite the novel’s opening paragraph describing the main character, Mr. Utterson, using precisely the same grammatical construction as Stevenson, but varying the vocabulary and subject matter to match members of their families. In this way, Stevenson’s opening sentence, becomes, as one student wrote, The students identify grammatical structures, literary devices, imagery, and patterns in content, but they experiment with variations to create their own meaning. The results are not perfect, but through variation, they take steps towards increasingly complex original work. In cla...

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...