Week 4~~History Of Creativity!

A new week again!!
WEEK 4!
Mr.Mustafa is Our lecturer today~

The topic of the lecture is talking about The History of Creativity~



What is the history of Creativity?

One look at the history of man’s ideas about creativity over the ages is all it takes to open a bottomless can of worms. Right from the start in ancient Greece, we have a controversy in the making. The Greek word for art is tecnhe which literally means, “the making of things according to rules.” Rules again!

The theory of the time was: since nature is perfect & operates according to laws, man made things should also conform to rules of ordered structure. How very different from the Puritan founding fathers of the United States who viewed nature as evil, unordered & untamed.

Not until the Latin word creatio comes about is there a title for “that which is created from nothing.” Of course, this is also the time of the Medieval Christian Church & human beings were not seen as capable of creatio, only God. At once, a distinction is made between God’s creative power & that of man, and a battle of semantics ensues.

Inspiration, that spark that ignites the fires of our imagination & impresses on us the need to create, comes from the Latin meaning “immediate influence of God,” and can be further understood by its underlying word inspirare which means to “inflame.” Literally, inspiration is in- “in” and spirare “to breathe” – to breathe in. In Latin, the word spirare is closely related to spiritus, “soul or breath.” Inspiration is the inhalation before the act of creation, the drawing in of the soul or God aspect into our creative process.


The Process of Creativity

The creative attribute has always been a highly debated and researched component of the human psyche. The “designer” job title seems to be one that calls to the more creative minded among us and according to some, requires the highest level of creative processing. This idea does lend itself to the truth, web designers are called upon to find creative solutions every day. However, we certainly aren’t alone.


-The Not-So-Random Spark

For designers we should be able to put this into context fairly easily. Certainly there are those among us who have been plagued with the eternal judgment of the typography, layout, and color choices that we see around us everywhere. Even the task of e-mail a client back and explaining why we shouldn’t make their logo bigger sparks thoughts of alignment, positioning and weight. In processing the things that we do or don’t like we constantly build our mental database of micro-ideas that we apply to our designs.


-Practicing Creativity

For some it may be a little disappointing to think that all of those inspirational moments that came over breakfast, in the shower or on the morning commute were a little more scripted than we thought. On the other side of that coin though lies the potential to place a little more control over our inspirations. Could it be possible that the answer to being a creative individual lies within a process that we can all replicate on demand?

Well, of course there is not worksheet to follow along with that can promise unlimited creative power. We all have different capacities for intelligence, imagination and creativity so naturally some will have higher creative thresholds than others. With that said, there area lot of theories out there about the various thought processes that spark creativity and how they can be harnessed.


-Two Heads are Always Better

Another interesting technique that plays along with the rules of disassociation is the process of making decisions for someone else. In a fun trick of the brain, it turns out that we may very likely be better at making more creative decisions for other people than we are for ourselves. Cashing in on this theory could take us down several paths.