The Creativity Crisis

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

by thaumaturgy • 16 years ago

75 42 16 years ago

ilkhd29• 16 years ago

Again the reason why creativity goes down - nowhere to apply it. There is no industry left in USA - the only way you can apply your creativity is by creating something, but your creations are not going to be competitive - chinese workforce cheaper, small shops you can sell through your staff all gone and replaced by targets/best buys/evilmarts and so on. Only things that are produced in USA is food and lo-tech wooden/metalwork.

greenlblue• 16 years ago

You've listed a bunch of problems but nowhere do I see any creative solutions. Wasn't that the main point of the article?

thaumaturgy6• 16 years ago

That was an odd comment to make, since it was unrelated to the content of the article and even somewhat runs contrary to what the article was about.

So I read through your comment history, and understood that you're just grinding an axe. It would be nice if you didn't do that.

Creativity doesn't require someone to buy it. The article did a pretty neat job of describing creativity, defining it, understanding it, and coming up with ways to improve it.

ilkhd29• 16 years ago

Creativity does not appear from nowhere. Of course, it is great to foster it, yet, with loss of industrial knowledge, less and less is left to be taught to people. I do not buy fairy tales that there is abstract creativity you can teach people - there is engineering, artistic, scientific "creativities". One of important sources of creativity come from successful examples of its implementation by other people, and the more industrial you are the more way to use your creativity and get feedback from real, tangible, physical world.

And here is my answer - you want be more creative in engineering creativity increase you industry output.

chipsy• 16 years ago

I have two responses to this.

First of all, it is getting absurdly easy to find useful feedback. For every topic you might discuss, for every skill you might learn, there's at least one discussion forum, and in each of those forums there are intense, even competitive practitioners of the involved art who will tear you apart if you aren't working up to standard. Sometimes this is done in bad faith, but on the whole, that part of the "creative loop" is the best it's ever been. The main factor that holds people back from any creative endeavor is motivation. When hanging out with friends the motivation problem becomes a major factor; our likelihood of engagement and satisfaction is a lot higher when we get together to _create_ rather than to _consume_. But we have to get ourselves pumped up to do something creative, and engagement is difficult because everyone involved has to pierce through the BS and fragile esteem that turns arbitrary activities into "hard work" or "way over my head."

My second point is that by losing the work environments in the "heavy" industries, the USA will be deprived of creatives in those fields - but that doesn't necessarily mean we lose out on creatives. Look at Richard Florida's books on the "Creative Class" - one of the points he argues is that our major cities are getting increasingly "peaky" as the creative people in each industry pool together more and more closely. We already have some creative powerhouses(NY, LA, SV to name a few), and there is no reason for them to decline anytime soon. Where we still have industries involving physical goods and high capital requirements, intense pressure exists to take a high-tech approach and automate everything rather than battle to get cheap labor. For example, think of what Amazon is doing with shipping. That stuff requires a lot of creative know-how, and in the coming years we're probably going to see similar approaches taken in a lot of industries that are traditionally "people services."

thaumaturgy6• 16 years ago

> But we have to get ourselves pumped up to do something creative, and engagement is difficult because everyone involved has to pierce through the BS and fragile esteem that turns arbitrary activities into "hard work" or "way over my head."

...and plain ol' laziness. I wrestle with this all the time -- it's quite hard to force myself to work on a project, or read a book, or pick up a pencil and try drawing again for the first time in decades, when I can instead pick up my laptop and browse HN for a while.

This problem is compounded by living vicariously: I can read about other people being creative, and that's fun.

Eventually I get to a point -- usually at the end of the day -- where I feel compelled to make, fix, or build something, but I should have been doing that all day anyway (and waiting until the end of the day is not optimal).

I've not yet figured out how to fix this.

cturner2• 16 years ago

   There is no industry left in USA

This is a myth. The US is still far and away the largest manufacturer.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/CompanyFocus/...

Even if it weren't true, there are more opportunities to be create value with unconstrained creativity than ever before.

You can sit down and write code or draw designs and be creative with zero outlay.

Excuses excuses excuses.

ilkhd29• 16 years ago

You are looking at a very wrong graph. This one is correct: http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2010/06/28/manufacturing.... Look carefully at China and Germany, and then to USA. See - QED - USA has no industry left.

There is no business case, no economic pressure for creativity. Yes, you can create, but you do not have time - for your creation nobody is gonna pay money - so there is no incentive to be creative.

Excuses?! Any engineer knows that many good ideas appear as the result of interaction with production process, but if something is designed in USA but made in China then the loopback time grows very big and you end up with making same boring stuff year after year, year after year...

zb• 16 years ago

You sort-of have a point. Here's Eugene Ferguson on the Sputnik-triggered creativity fad of the 1950s:

More important to a designer than a set of techniques (empty of content) to induce creativity are a knowledge of current practice and products and a growing stock of firsthand knowledge and insights gained through critical field observation of engineering projects and industrial plants. In the 1950s, engineering schools still provided many opportunities to gather such knowledge. It is ironic that the radical change in curricula [introducing "creativity" courses] that occurred n the 1950s eliminated those activities that put the students in touch with the authentic world of engineering. - Engineering and the Mind's Eye, pp. 57-58

(For the record, I don't buy into your theory that China is a problem here at all.)

But, the article claims the worst decline is in children from kindergarten to sixth grade. I respectfully submit that such children are probably not taking geopolitical factors into account in their decision to not be creative.

I personally suspect that the test is a bit of a crock. Notwithstanding that, and a bit of the usual left brain/right brain nonsense thrown in, it actually seemed like a pretty good article (though probably not as good as if they'd left "creativity" out of it). An emphasis on rote learning and standardised tests, if that is indeed the way the system is going, is definitely going to have an impact on engagement if nothing else.

ThomPete• 16 years ago

You want to teach children to be creative, you teach them to be the active builders of their own intellectual structure to quote Piagat and Seymoure Papert.

Papert is the inventor of Logo and his book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas inspired the name of Lego Mindstorms.

That book shows how education should be taught.

hooande• 16 years ago

This part of the article jumped out at me:

"When UGA’s Runco was driving through California one day with his family, his son asked why Sacramento was the state’s capital - why not San Francisco or Los Angeles? Runco turned the question back on him, encouraging him to come up with as many explanations as he could think of."

This seems like a great way to teach children to be creative, and just generally intelligent.

thaumaturgy6• 16 years ago

It's a tactic that goes back as far as Socrates at least ("Socratic dialogue"), and it's very effective. Unfortunately it also requires a great depth of knowledge and patience on the part of the teacher, so it would be hard to get this to take off in U.S. schools at the moment.

mfukar2• 16 years ago

"...it also requires a great depth of knowledge and patience on the part of the teacher..."

Not to mention imagination and creativity. I'm not completely aware of the situation in U.S. schools, but here (Greece) it's utterly terrible, even in private schools/colleges.

But this essentially goes to show that education and culture (or lack thereof) can have an avalanche effect on society, yet we don't pay as much attention to it as we should (see the planned 25% budget cuts on education in the UK, and elsewhere).

wdewind• 16 years ago

So I went to a high school which claimed to practice the "Socratic Method." Now I'm not saying it can't be used correctly, but in 90% of the cases it was used it was sticking us in a lab, showing us an experiment and asking us what happened, THEN having us do the reading. It makes NO sense and was a HUGE waste of time.

As a tool in your arsenal it's great, as the cornerpiece of your education system it's really not. People need to be shown what to do ultimately.

Finally, America is becoming "less creative" based purely on the judgment of two scientists (literally they look at the drawings and say "I give this one a 15/18"). Seems a little melodramatic/farfetched. I'd be the first to believe the hypothesis but what a stupid experiment.

jimbokun3• 16 years ago

I have children, and I need to do more of this.

madair• 16 years ago

This is why Feynmann disliked the social sciences, seriously, the Torrance tests is a perfect application of all of the problems with highly interpretative "tests".

kiba• 16 years ago

Can you give us a detailed explanation of why Torrance tests are problematic?

lkozma• 16 years ago

"The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation" ...

I wouldn't be too worried about this.

lucidguppy• 16 years ago

Hey look everyone! A new educational crisis! Quick, get the money canon.

joelhaus• 16 years ago

Worth the read. I usually (wrongly) associate creativity with the arts, but this article frames it as a crucial skill for effective problem solving. Is there a more fulfilling way to learn a subject than solving a real world problem that requires you to understand it?

It was especially encouraging to hear how schools can fulfill the standardized curriculum requirements without turning the kids into zombies:

[...] they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum "from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. "You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’" says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. "Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’"

jimbokun3• 16 years ago

This is kind of like how Mr. Miyagi teaches Karate. They didn't even realize they were mastering the standardized curriculum, until they had already done it.

The Creativity Crisis

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