Refugees are possibly the most creative people. Forced to move by any number of pressures — military, social, political, economic — they make perilous journeys to places safer than those of their origin, which may nevertheless be fraught with danger. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai states that as refugees move through shifting contexts and "can never afford to let their imaginations rest too long, even if they wished to." The requirement for refugees to "build worlds" in response to the destruction of their homes — places that have constituted their worlds for years — highlights both their closeness to, and their distance from, those into whose worlds refugees now impact. We all need to build worlds, but for some this imaginative requirement is more pressing. This is a moment of heightened importance for the many senses of dignity, subjectification and anticipation that Hannah Arendt had already noted.
A review of available literature on creativity was undertaken to determine the definition of creativity, the common traits displayed by those perceived as being creative and how those traits may possibly be nurtured. The word 'creativity' has been used by politicians as if it is tangible commodity that must be developed in time of economic recession. Indeed, Dublin City Enterprise Board, a local government authority are in the process of staging 'Idea Generation' workshops, "this workshop not only shows you what ideas are good ideas but also introduces you to the concepts of thinking laterally" (Dublin Regional Authority, 2011). The Science Gallery in Trinity College, Dublin has held a series of events called Connector Brainstorm. "Einstein once said 'We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.' Age old policies need new age thinking and with this in mind our team of experts came up with some radical suggestions on how the future of Irish politics and economy should be ran." (Lynch, 2010). The elusive commodity of creativity and creative thinking has been heralded as the panacea to rescue us from the grip of the recession. But what defines creativity? What are common traits? And can we nurture them?
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ; Graphic design practice is currently entrenched within a process-driven, formulaic approach to design that is time constrained and closely aligned with the working practices of the business environment. This approach is not conducive to creativity. Although design institutions recognise the call from UK governments for increased creativity and innovation in support of economic, social, and cultural initiatives the current commodification of knowledge, developed in response to the needs of business and industry, has its limitations. There is today a tension in the academic community between the pursuit of creative practice as a valuable entity in itself and the preparation of graduates for employment. There is a growing concern within the industry at the educational marginalisation of creativity within the design process in an attempt to remain current with technological and professional skilling. The intellectual and theoretical underpinning of graphic design is weak with little scholarly debate in relation to creativity and critical thinking. The aim of this research therefore is to support future practice and educational initiatives by developing a new theoretical and contextual framework from which to engage with both industry and education. Utilising a mixed method approach together with the insider/outsider status of the researcher working as both a design practitioner and design educator the research addresses the following questions: what is the role of creativity in graphic design? Why is creativity important to graphic design education and industry practice? How can creativity be facilitated within graphic design education and industry practice? A small-scale qualitative online survey was conducted initially in the form of a targeted emailed questionnaire. It collected opinions, knowledge, and experiences from 9 universities within the UK Higher Education sector and a small number of industry practitioners. The aim was to gain insights from a cross-section of individuals most likely to have special knowledge about the research topic and provide a snapshot of how things are currently. The study built on these insights by considering creativity in different contexts and demonstrates through substantial critical investigation and analysis the theoretical and contextual knowledge underpinning discussions in relation to creativity. It explores the significance of creativity as a term and an activity in graphic design. It examines possible explanations for the marginalisation of creativity in graphic design by looking at the historical precedents for the split between the fine and applied arts and the impact that this has had on the way that design has been taught and practiced. The findings confirm that understanding the role of creativity within practice is fundamental to ensuring that graphic design remains relevant in twenty first century culture and society. However, what creativity is and the various forms it can take may be different to what is currently recognised by education and industry practice.
The Mad Genius is a recurring stereotype of contemporary cultural expression. However, starting with Lombroso's investigation of genius and madness in 1888, recent decades have seen an increasing number of empirical studies suggesting that there really is an association between creativity and psychopathology. Still, taken together, the empirical support is unconvincing - largely due to a heavy reliance on biographical data and small cohorts. The primary aim of this thesis is therefore to investigate the question of a possible association between creativity and psychopathology using large scale population based epidemiological methods. The proposed association of creativity and psychopathology has often been placed in an evolutionary context, where the burden of psychopathology is compensated for by the advantage of increased creativity. The secondary aim of this thesis is to elucidate if a putative association between creativity and psychopathology may be mediated through genetic factors under positive selection. In our first study (study I), based on Swedish national registries, the likelihood of holding a creative profession (artistic and scientific occupations) in individuals (n~300 000) with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or unipolar depression and their healthy relatives was compared to that of controls. Results demonstrated that individuals with bipolar disorder and healthy siblings of people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are overrepresented in creative professions. We followed up these findings in study II using a dataset with a considerably larger sample of patients (n~1 200 000) to survey other psychiatric diagnoses and to validate previous findings. Study IV investigated the notion that bipolar disorder is common in prominent historical leaders, e.g., Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Results showed that individuals with bipolar disorder without comorbidity and their healthy siblings were overrepresented in the highest strata of officer suitability, a rating of leadership potential. The siblings were also overrepresented in executive professions, specifically in the subgroup of political professions. In study III we addressed the evolutionary framework by investigating the fertility of individuals with psychiatric disorders and their healthy siblings. A total of ~ 2.3 million individuals were included. With the exception of women with depression, patients had significantly fewer children than the general population. The evolutionary hypothesis was further investigated in study V , where we systematically reviewed the genetics of creativity and estimated the heritability of creativity in two new original studies. Results support a genetic component in creativity, and for the first time suggest that this is contingent on sex. In conclusion, this thesis provides support for a familial cosegregation of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder with creativity, and suggests that this may be mediated through a genetic mechanism. Results do not support, however, that any psychiatric disorder per se is under positive selection.
After presenting a critique of both negative and positive freedom this essay pursues the relation between creativity and freedom, drawing upon Foucault, Deleuze and Nietzsche to do so. Once you have understood Nietzsche's reading of a culturally infused nest of drives in a self, the task becomes easier. A drive is not merely a force pushing forward; it is also a simple mode of perception and intention that pushes forward and enters into creative relations with other drives when activated by an event. You can also understand more sharply how the Foucauldian tactics of the self work. We can now carry this insight into the Deleuzian territory of micropolitics and collective action by reviewing his work on flashbacks and "the powers of the false." If a flashback in film pulls us back to a bifurcation point where two paths were possible and one was taken, the powers of the false refer to the subliminal role the path not taken can play in the formation of creative action. As you pursue these themes you see that neither old, organic notions of belonging to the world nor do negative notions of detachment as such do the work needed. Deleuze's notion of freedom carries us to the idea of cultivating "belief" in a world of periodic punctuations. The latter are essential to creativity and incompatible with organic belonging. They are also indispensable supports of a positive politics today.
This paper looks at corpus- and survey-based evidence of innovative interpretative metaphor use that changes the default meaning of well-established figurative constructions. Specifically, we look at interpretation induced changes in the meaning of corporeal metaphors, on the basis of a corpus of British political discourse and a questionnaire survey of more than 1000 respondents from 31 linguistic backgrounds in 10 countries. The corpus-based evidence consists of metaphor-production data that show how situational variation in metaphor use can over time create a semantic-pragmatic drift that changes the dominant meaning of a conventional metaphor expression. The questionnaire survey reveals four distinct models for BODY focused readings (i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY, AS HIERARCHICAL FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, AS PART OF SPEAKER'S BODY, AS PART OF LARGER BODY), plus a further set PERSON-focused readings. The two most frequent BODY-focused interpretations, i.e. NATION AS GEOBODY and NATION AS HIERARCHICAL FUNCTIONAL WHOLE, as well as the PERSON-stereotypes versions show divergent frequency and elaboration patterns across the Chinese- vs. English-L1 respondent groups, which may be linked to specific cultural conceptual and discursive traditions. Both data sets indicate a strong creative element in metaphor interpretation, which accounts for a significant degree of variation in the creation of new metaphorical concepts.
Sy Taffel is a senior lecturer in media studies and co-director of the Political Ecology Research Centre at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand. He has published work on political ecologies of digital media, media and materiality, hacktivism, automation, and pervasive/locative media. He is the author of Digital Media Ecologies (Bloomsbury 2019) and a co-editor of Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene (Lexington, 2017 with Nicholas Holm).
The aim of this paper is to assess the role played by creativity and other components of human capital on the process of economic growth for 257 regions in the 27 member countries of the European Union. We first decompose the regional human capital endowment to distinguish between the educational component (the share of individuals with a university degree) and the creativity component, which considers the actual occupations of individuals in specific jobs like science, engineering, education, arts and entertainment. We define three non overlapping categories of human capital (creative graduates, bohemians and non creative graduates) which are simultaneously included in a spatial model as determinants of regional growth measured by labour productivity. After extending the analysis to control for other relevant factors which may affect regional development, such as physical, technological and social capital, cultural diversity, industrial and geographical characteristics, we provide robust evidence on the growth enhancing effects of graduates, in particular for those of the creative category.
Creative problem-solving by corporations is frequently conducted within a group or a team framework. A relevant issue is to try to determine which type of corporate culture is most effective in enhancing performance in creative tasks. We present a series of experiments that aim at studying group creativity in contexts where corporate culture may tend to promote cooperation or competition among group members. Our experimental results show that cooperative corporate culture fosters creativity. We identify the reason for success as the emergence within the group of a social norm of high effort.
Crafting and stimulating service innovation is considered a main research priority and remains a challenge for service providers. One suggested component of stimulating service innovation is customer creativity. Customers who adapt, modify and transform services or products to better suit themselves are increasingly being recognized as a source of competitive value and innovation. It has been proposed that understanding and supporting the customer's value creating practices is the key to creating and sustaining value over time in health care. Health services directly address a customer's well-being and have a significant impact on his or her quality of life. In these types of services, the service outcome is highly dependent on the activities of the individual customer. Health care services often require customers to participate extensively, over long periods of time, with limited support and control. Health services also stretch far beyond the particular service setting into the customer's daily life. While research, policy, and legislation have all emphasized the active role of health care customers, such customers have traditionally had few opportunities to design their health care services. Nevertheless, health care customers solve health-related problems and engage in self-care and medical decision-making on a day-to-day basis, although this creativity is often unknown to the service provider. To understand how health care customers can enable service innovation, this thesis seeks to conceptualize and investigate the concept of customer creativity in health care. The thesis focuses on customer creativity, not only as an outcome, but also as a dynamic and contextualized process that can be enhanced. The thesis combines insights from health care research with service and innovation research to provide build a framework for health care customer creativity. Building on five papers, the research develops an understanding for health care customer creativity. The individual papers are based on systematic literature reviews as well as empirical data in the form of customers' ideas for service innovation collected through diaries. The results of the thesis suggest that despite the negative nature of the service, health care customers are creative. Given the opportunity, health care customers can provide creative ideas and solutions on a multitude of aspects, both within and outside the health care setting. This provides the potential to view the health care experience through the customers' eyes and take part in their creativity in spheres where the service providers have not traditionally had any access. This thesis contributes to the literature by providing a framework for health care customer creativity that recognizes the concept as a complex interplay of factors operating at the individual, contextual, and situational levels. The proposed framework specifies the health care specific factors upon which customer creativity depends, with the intention of positing potential research directions and developing an enriched theory of health care customer creativity.
The objective of this paper is to construct a creativity composite index designed to capture the growing role of creativity in driving economic and social development for the 27 European Union countries. The paper proposes a new approach for the measurement of EU-27 creative potential and for determining its capacity to attract and develop creative human capital. We apply a modified version of the 3T model developed by Richard Florida and Irene Tinagli for constructing a Euro-Creativity Index. The resulting indexes establish a quantitative base for policy makers, supporting their efforts to determine the contribution of creativity to economic development.
La creatividad es un trabajo constante, es producir respuestas inesperadas; esta en las cosas comunes de la vida diaria; la tarea esta en profesionalizar la creatividad, ya que crear es algo metódico, un trabajo constante. ; Creativity is a constant work is to produce unexpected responses, is in the common things of everyday life, the task is to professionalize the creativity, as is another thing, methodical, steady occupation.
Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place in March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. At once a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book's own theory of creativity – "a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created – original inauthenticity" – this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies. The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone.
Participatory art and design is an eclectic domain and an increasingly relevant trend. We have been witnessing the profusion of projects of an activist nature, simultaneously informed by ethics, aesthetics and politics, which aim to benefit society. Encouraging the social and cultural sustainability of citizens living in disenfranchised residential areas by developing their creativity in a systematised way is the scope of the present research. Through an experimental methodology focused on project development, three case studies are presented—Netskola, Kowork and More South—all of which took place in socially and culturally disenfranchised neighbourhoods of the wider Lisbon area, specifically in the cities of Amadora and Oeiras. Then follows a case study evaluation conducted using the Delphi method. The research concluded that participatory art and design is a holistic territory that can be understood as interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary and that this understanding can foster the development of alternative and innovative solutions that contribute to the sociocultural sustainability of vulnerable urban areas. Recognising the advantage of this expanded field and enhancing the socially engaged art domains is not only important for these areas of knowledge, which can thus develop further, but also for the many situations in society that can benefit from systematic creativity.
Abstract In the interrelated knowledge economy the fostering of creativity is key and as such is the focus of many government initiatives internationally. But is an international definition of creativity achievable or even desirable? Comparisons of different cultures' propensities for creativity are problematic when we consider that most creativity research has taken place in Western cultures, with Western measures; and when creativity is defined as revolutionary this has often presented a dichotomous view of creativity that equates Westernisation with modernity. As a form of communication, creativity is open to mis- translation across cultures and despite some consensus between the West and Confucian heritage cultures on the desirable attributes to facilitate creativity, misunderstandings of creative practice based on cultural general tendencies such as individualism and collectivism remain. This paper reviews the literature on the development of concepts of creativity in Western and Confucian heritage cultures as well as reporting on a qualitative research study into the understandings and practice of creativity in a London art and design college in order to comment on the existence of a cross-cultural creativity divide and suggest that rather than be set against each other, creativity is enhanced by cultural creativity exchange and cross-cultural collaboration.
