Sometimes, I wonder why designers (me included) seem to have a lack of understanding of creativity. I know that my uni. taught me nothing about what is known about creativity. Has anyone had courses?
I read a couple of great books over the last 2 years that I highly recommend for people looking to fine tune what we do:
Imagine by Jonah Lehrer - Yeah, he made up some Dylan quotes and plagiarized, but this is a great book and I think the fundamentals were spot on correct.
The Myths of Creativity by David Burkus - He includes a little more process and his sources are clearly identified, so if you want to dive deeper, this is a great starting point.
The core thing that I took away from Burkus is what psychology suggests is how the creative process works. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi developed a five step process of creativity in the '90s. It closely followed a four step process from a French psychologist in the 1800’s. In any case it goes:
preperation: the knowledge and experience that you have along with whatever your design brief or experiements have taught you about the challenge you are facing
Incubation: The brain is complicated. It’s not a calculator that can spit out the results for 24^69 in .01 seconds. However, it’s so powerful that it can learn how to walk, talk, interpret the world better than anything else known. Therefore, it takes time for the brain to make the creative connections between disparate thoughts, ideas, knowledge and experience. This is the time for vacations, walks in the woods or on the beach, surfing, bowling, etc.
Insight: This is when we make the connection. All of a sudden we see the problem in a new light.
Evaluation: We decide if the insight is worth pursuing.
Elaboration: Make it work.
I’ve found my education to be focused on “elaboration” only. We did touch on evaluation, but we did it horribly. The first three steps were completely ignored beyond the vague and seldom comments like, “go take a walk when you hit a wall” on a project.
Anyone else have any juicy sources or experience?